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THE 
BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 




© Underwood & Underwood 

"treat 'em rough" 

American manned French whippet tank put out of action by a German shell, 
defending himself with his rifle 



Its operator is 



THE 
BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

1914-1918 

A YOUNG FOLKS' HISTORY 
OF THE GREAT WAR 



BY 
FREDERIC ARNOLD KUMMER, C.E. 

Mem. Am. Soc. C. E. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH 
PHOTOGRAPHS 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1919 






Copyright, 1919, by 
The Centuby Co. 



Published, May, 1919 



©CL A 5 156 7 2 






TO 
MY CHILDREN 



PREFACE 

It is one of my privileges, as a writer, to 
spend my days at home, and hence to enjoy a 
closer association with my children than falls to 
the lot of the average father. The youthful mind 
grows through asking questions, and all parents 
with a sense of their responsibilities do their best 
to answer them. During the progress of the Great 
War I was called upon on numberless occasions 
to explain to my youngsters what it was all about, 
and my efforts in this direction seemed so satis- 
factory to my own children that I am emboldened 
to put them in the form of a book, in the hope that 
they may prove equally so to the children of other 
parents not so fortunately situated as I have been. 

Frederic Arnold Kummbr. 
Oatonsville, Maryland, 
December 10, 1918. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I 



PAOB 



The Causes 3 

II The Beginning of the War .... 20 

III Germany's War Plans 26 

IV The Drive Through Belgium ... 38 
V The Battle of the Marne .... 46 

VI The Race for the Channel Ports . . 56 
VII Other Events in the Early Part of 

the War 

VIII Trench and Other Warfare in the 

Year 1915 80 

IX Western and Turkish Fronts in 1915 90 
X The Sinking of the Lusitania . . • 100 
XI The Eastern Front During 1914 and 

1915 106 

XII Italy and the Balkan States . . .118 

XIII Other Events in 1915 129 

XIV Verdun and the First Battle of the 

Somme !35 

XV Sea Power and the Battle of Jutland 148 

XVI Russia, Austria, and Italy in 1916 . 156 

XVII Rumania and the Near East in 1916 . 161 

XVIII Other Events During 1916 . . . .168 

XIX Uncivilized Warfare 175 

XX The Beginning of the Year 1917 . . 180 

XXI America Enters the War .... 192 

XXII Military Operations in 1917 . . • 207 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

XXIII 

XXIV 

XXV 

XXVI 

XXVII 

XXVIII 

XXIX 

XXX 



PAGE 

Effects of the Russian Revolution . 220 
American Forces Abroad During 1917 225 



The Beginning of the Year 1918 
The Great Battle of 1918 . 
The Great Battle of 1918 . 
The Great Battle of 1918 . 
The Great Battle of 1918 . 
Results of the War . . . 



232 
237 
265 
284 
301 
322 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



-Treat 'em rough" FronUs ?™V 

PAGE I 

Airplanes of a famous fighting squadron in France . W 
A German Zeppelin in flight over the North Sea . 33 

Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre 

49 

The Western Front • ' ' 

American officer wearing protective armor found in ^ 

a captured German trench 

A working party of British Tommies going over the ^ 

top at night 

Russian artillery in action against the Germans on 

the Eastern Front 

113 
Campaigning in the Alps 

The famous Cloth Hall at Ypres, Belgium ... 128 

129 
Heavy British tank in difficulties 

A " Fleet" of French Whippet Tanks . . . • 129 

u ... 160 

German submarine 

Ruined French orchards 

German shell bursting upon the cathedral at Rheims 176 

177 
Edith Cavell 

177 
Captain Fryatt 

An American trench mortar battery at practice 

"somewhere in France" 

A 14-inch U. S. Naval Gun, with railway mount . 193 
Austrians who had taken refuge in a cave ... 208 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



The Italian Front 209V 

Marshal Ferdinand Fo-ch 224 

General John Joseph Pershing 225/ 

Map of Turkey in Asia 240 

Jerusalem 241 

A tunnel of the St. Quentin Canal 272- 

Chateau-Thierry 273 

Englishmen who helped win the war 288 

Supreme figures in the war councils of the European 
Allies 289 

Four famous Allied commanders 304 

On the deck of the battleship New York . . . 305 

Surrender of the German high seas fleet .... 320 

President Wilson and party 321 



FOREWORD 

The Battle of the Nations began in the year 
1914, that is, one thousand, nine hundred and 
fourteen years after the birth of Christ, and lasted 
for over four and a quarter years. It was by 
far the greatest conflict in history, not alone be- 
cause of the number of nations and men engaged 
on the two sides and the losses in life and prop- 
erty sustained, but also, and more particularly, 
because of the supreme importance to humanity 
of the questions involved. 

Before the colossal struggle came to an end, 
over a score of nations had taken up arms, the 
fighting had extended from Europe to Asia, 
Africa, and the islands of the Pacific, and the ef- 
fects of the conflict had been felt in every quarter 
of the globe. It was in truth a world war, and at 
its roots lay the struggle for freedom, for self- 
government, on the part of the people, which has 
been going on ever since the dawn of history. 

The time had come, in the onward progress of 
events, when great and far-reaching changes in 
the world's social system were necessary, and 
hence, in one sense, it may be said that the war 
was inevitable, even though its immediate causes 
were the greed and arrogance of a single small 
group of men. For many generations the de- 
tails of this epoch-making conflict will be dis- 

vii 



viii FOREWORD 

cussed; countless books will be written about it, 
covering its every phase. Within the limits of a 
single volume we cannot hope to do more than 
give a brief outline of its causes, its progress, and 
its effects. These once grasped, it becomes pos- 
sible to undertake the study of the war in its more 
detailed aspects. 

A very few figures are needed to show how vast 
the struggle was. It is estimated, although such 
estimates are by no means exact, that the war 
cost the world, in military expenditures alone, 
close to three hundred billion dollars. The hu- 
man mind is unable to grasp such tremendous 
figures. Rough estimates of the casualties — that 
is, the number of men killed, wounded, and missing 
— in the armies of the various countries involved, 
are, for Russia, 7,000,000 ; for Germany, 6,000,000; 
for Great Britain, 3,000,000; for France, 4,000,- 
000; for Belgium, 350,000; for Austria, 4,500,000; 
for Italy, 1,750,000; for Bulgaria, 200,000; for 
Turkey, 750,000; for Rumania, 200,000; for Ser- 
bia, 300,000; for Greece, 75,000, and for the 
United States, 275,000, a total of over 28,000,000 
men. Over a million Armenians and other non- 
combatants were murdered. Losses in money 
and property almost beyond computation were 
sustained. The cost of the ships sunk, alone, was 
close to $6,000,000,000, while the value of the 
buildings and personal property destroyed in 
Belgium, France, Serbia, and other countries 
within the war zone runs to unbelievable figures. 



FOREWORD ix 

If, however, the losses were gigantic, the re- 
sults obtained may in a sense be said to have 
compensated for them. An epitaph over the 
graves of some British soldiers in France reads, 
"For your to-morrow they gave their to-day." 
In this beautiful thought we find the answer to 
the question, Was the war worth while? Future 
generations, reaping the harvest which this gene- 
ration has sown, will answer in the affirmative. 
The people of Germany, their nightmare of mili- 
tarism gone, of Poland, free and united after 
their many years of suffering and oppression, of 
Austria, no longer under the iron heel of the 
Hapsburgs, of Bohemia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, 
Montenegro, Eumania, Transylvania, Bessarabia, 
Serbia, and the vast territories of Russia, of Tur- 
key, of colonies in Africa, freed from the brutal 
misrule of the Kaiser, and last, but not least, of 
the Allied countries of Europe and of the United 
States itself, will, as the blessings of world free- 
dom become more and more apparent, rise up and 
pay homage to those heroic men who, from so 
many countries and in so many climes, for the 
sake of our to-morrow gave us their to-day. 

We cannot approach the study of this war as 
we would that of any other war in history. It 
was really not a war, so much as a world move- 
ment — the greatest that mankind has ever known. 



THE BATTLE OF THE 
NATIONS 



THE BATTLE OF THE 
NATIONS 



CHAPTER I 

THE CAUSES 

IN order that we may fully understand the 
causes of the great war let us look at a map 
of Europe as it was in July, 1914, before the war 
began. 

We find that the German Empire, ruled by the 
Emperor or Kaiser William II, and the Austro- 
Hungarian Empire, ruled, when the war broke out, 
by the Emperor Francis Joseph, stretched in an 
unbroken body of land from the shores of the 
North and Baltic seas to the river Danube. These 
two countries and Italy had agreed among them- 
selves that were any one of the three to be attacked 
by another power, the other two would at once 
come to its assistance. This agreement between 
Germany, Austria, and Italy was known as the 
Triple Alliance. 

The other three great countries of Europe, as 
the map will show, were England, France, and 
Russia. Of these nations, two, France and Rus- 

3 



4 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

sia, had an agreement to support each other in 
case of war, and the third, England, while not 
bound by any definite agreements with France 
and Russia, had given those countries to under- 
stand that if they were attacked by the Triple 
Alliance, she would come to their aid. This ar- 
rangement was known as the "Entente cordiale." 
England had also, some years before, entered into 
an offensive and defensive alliance with Japan, 
the purpose of which was to preserve the peace 
in the Far East. 

Six other and smaller nations in Europe, as well 
as one in both Europe and Asia, also demand our 
attention. These are Belgium, on the North Sea, 
partially surrounded by France, Germany, and 
Holland ; Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, 
and Greece, lying in the Balkan Peninsula, between 
the Black and the Adriatic seas, and Turkey, 
spreading from a small foothold in Europe at the 
tip of the Balkan Peninsula, across the Straits 
of the Dardanelles into Asia. It is necessary, in 
order to understand fully the causes which 
brought about the great war, to keep the locations 
of these several countries clearly in mind. 

First, however, before we can take up the im- 
mediate causes of the war, we must understand 
something about Germany, and its ruler, the 
kaiser. 

The German Empire, in the year 1914, was one 
of the richest and most powerful as well as one 



THE CAUSES 5 

of the youngest nations in Europe. It consisted 
of a federation of kingdoms and smaller states 
under the rule of the German Emperor, who was 
also the King of Prussia. The Kingdom of Prus- 
sia had for a long time been a nation that loved 
war. The great Napoleon once said that the 
Prussian state was hatched from a cannon-ball. 
Less than a hundred years ago, and long after 
Washington had fought the war which made Amer- 
ica free, Prussia was an insignificant state com- 
pared with the great nations of Europe, such as 
France, Eussia, and England. The members of 
its ruling family, the Hohenzollerns, were thor- 
oughly unscrupulous, with little or no regard for 
the rights of others, and their great ambition was 
to make Prussia the leading nation of Europe. 

Prussia was thoroughly beaten and humiliated 
by France under Napoleon at the battle of Jena, 
in 1806, but her revenge came at Waterloo, when 
Bliicher arrived with his army and assisted in 
the defeat of the great emperor. This, however, 
by no means satisfied the rulers of Prussia. They 
longed for greater power, and determined to get 
it, by any and every means at their command. 

There was no German Empire at this time. 
The country we now call Germany consisted of a 
large number of separate states, each with its 
own ruler. There were also four free cities. 
Some of the states, especially those in the south, 
such as Wiirtemberg and Bavaria, hated the 



6 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Prussians cordially, but in spite of this fact the 
King of Prussia, William I, most ably assisted 
by his Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, determined to 
unite them in a single empire, of which Prussia 
should be the leading state, and he the supreme 
ruler. 

We need not follow in detail the devious steps 
by which this was brought about. Prussia 's meth- 
ods had been very much the same ever since the 
ancestor of the Hohenzollerns, the Elector of 
Brandenburg, first came into power. Her rulers 
believed that might makes right, and that in order 
to make one's country great it was necessary only 
to seize the lands of weaker neighbors. In this 
way the two Danish provinces of Schleswig and 
Holstein, situated at the base of the Jutland Penin- 
sula upon which Denmark lies, were boldly taken, 
and when Austria, who had assisted Prussia in 
the theft, became angry because Bismarck would 
give her none of the spoils, the "Iron Chancellor," 
as he was called, at once attacked Austria and de- 
feated her decisively at the Battle of Sadowa, 
after a war which lasted only six weeks. This 
war made Prussia master of Austria, and she 
remained so for over fifty years. 

One of the chief reasons for the quick military 
successes which Prussia gained in her wars arose 
from the fact that her army was not a paid or 
regular army, hired for the purpose of defending 
the country or attacking its enemies, but an army 



THE CAUSES 7 

of the people. Every man physically fit was 
obliged to serve, the nobles, who formed the mili- 
tary class, taking the positions of officers, while 
the common people were trained as soldiers under 
the most severe discipline in Europe. It was 
Frederick the Great, one of the earlier Hohen- 
zollern kings of Prussia, who instituted this sys- 
tem of universal military training, and as a re- 
sult of it his armies were able to seize and add 
to his dominions much additional territory, in- 
cluding a large part of the Kingdom of Poland, 
the other two parts of this unhappy country being 
held by Austria and Russia. 

One result of Prussia's success against Austria 
was the formation of the North German Confed- 
eration, which consisted of a union of all the inde- 
pendent states in the north of Germany under 
the leadership of the King of Prussia. Bis- 
marck's dream of a united Germany under Prus- 
sian domination was thus partly realized. 

It required a war to fulfil it completely, and this 
war Bismarck soon supplied. Flushed with suc- 
cess, confident that his country could defeat any 
nation in Europe, he proceeded by diplomatic 
means to cause Napoleon III, the weak and in- 
competent Emperor of the French, to declare war 
against Germany in 1870. France, with the glori- 
ous memories of the great Napoleon behind her, 
anticipated no difficulty in defeating Germany, but 
when the Prussian troops, assisted by the South 



8 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Germans (who had become suspicious of France's 
intentions toward them), crossed the border into 
France, it was soon evident that the French with 
all their bravery were not trained, equipped, or 
led as well as were the German forces, and the 
latter won a quick and easy victory. Within a 
few weeks two great French armies had sur- 
rendered, one at Metz, the powerful fortress of 
Lorraine, the other at Sedan. It would be well 
to remember the names of these two places, since 
by some strange coincidence the concluding acts 
of the great war took place at almost the same 
spots. 

Now that her armies had been captured, and 
with them her emperor, France declared herself 
a republic. She was helpless, however, and al- 
though Paris made a brave resistance and held 
out for several months, it was at last taken, and 
at the palace of Versailles William I, King of 
Prussia, was declared the German Emperor. 
Thus the German Empire was formed, in the year 
1871, just forty-three years before the outbreak 
of the great war. 

France, defeated, was forced to pay to Germany 
a billion dollars and, what was even more impor- 
tant, to give up to her conquerors the valuable 
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, situated along 
the western shores of the river Ehine. These prov- 
inces, the population of which was for the most 
part French, contained some of the most valuable 



THE CAUSES 9 

deposits of iron in Europe, although at the time 
Bismarck forced France to give them up the 
value of these ores was not known. 

As a result of this war, which she had not sought 
and which had cost her so much money and ter- 
ritory, France felt a secret hatred for Germany, 
and the two countries regarded each other as nat- 
ural enemies. Germany, knowing that the people 
of Alsace-Lorraine were at heart in sympathy with 
the French, proceeded to make every effort to 
stamp out this feeling. The use of the French 
language in churches and schools was forbidden, 
the French national air could not be played or 
sung, nor could the tricolor be displayed. Such 
attempts at the repression of the patriotic instincts 
of a people have never succeeded, yet Germany 
persisted in them, for upon such repression her 
whole system of autocratic rule was based. She 
had followed the same course in Poland for years, 
without success, and Austria was doing the same 
thing in the case of the many millions of Italians, 
Poles, Yugo-Slavs, Czechs, Rumanians, Croats, 
Slovenes and others held under her rule against 
their will. In other parts of the world the same 
process was going on — in Turkey with the Ar- 
menians and Arabs, in Russia with the Poles, 
Finns, and other races. Down to the very end 
of the nineteenth century kings and emperors 
considered it their right to treat alien peoples and 
their territories as pawns, to be handed about from 



10 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

one to the other in accordance with the results 
of some mighty game of chess played about the 
diplomatic peace table. This arbitrary and 
wrongful treatment of alien races was the chief 
underlying cause of the great war. 

From France's defeat in 1871 to the begin- 
ning of the great war, over forty years elapsed. 
Emperor William I died, and his son Frederick 
soon followed him. In 1888 Kaiser William II 
came to the throne, dreaming of world power. 
Arrogant without being able or brilliant, he soon 
quarreled with Bismarck, and dismissed him. 
During this time Germany had been secretly plan- 
ning, with the assistance of Austria, to extend her 
rule over still other alien peoples and races, and 
the new kaiser began to push with redoubled vigor 
his preparations for the war he knew was sure 
to come. These preparations did not consist alone 
in training armies and building ships, cannon, and 
fortifications. Other means were adopted. The 
people of Germany were told over and over that 
their wars in the past had been enormously profit- 
able to them, in both money and territory, and that 
the next war would bring to their doors the riches 
of the world. In the German schools war was 
glorified as man's highest duty; might was placed 
above right; children were taught to believe that 
the German race was superior to all other races, 
the chosen people of God, to whom was entrusted 
the divine mission to rule the world. All this 



THE CAUSES 11 

nonsense was just as much a preparation for war 
as was the making of cannon; the kaiser's plans 
were to enslave other races and he thought that 
if he could make his people believe that in commit- 
ting these crimes against humanity they were 
carrying out a divine command, he would have no 
difficulty in gaining their support. The method 
was an old one. From time immemorial unscru- 
pulous rulers have claimed special permission 
from God to carry out their conquests so as the 
more easily to delude their ignorant subjects into 
assisting them. Hence the kaiser went up and 
down his country for twenty-five years, telling his 
people that small nations had no rights, and that 
he was ordained by God to give to these nations 
the sort of civilization they ought to have, whether 
they wanted it or not. It is improbable that the 
kaiser believed this ; he merely dreamed of being 
another Caesar or Alexander. 

Other and more sinister methods were being 
used to prepare for the coming war. In every 
foreign country Germany's secret agents were at 
work, collecting information, organizing treach- 
ery, planning revolt. Among the officers of her 
navy "Der Tag" ("The Day") was a common 
toast, and meant the day when war would begin. 
Books were written and widely read, showing how 
Germany planned to seize Belgium and northern 
France, control the Channel ports, defeat Eng- 
land, make herself master of India, Egypt, and 



12 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Western Russia, and gradually force her kultur, 
as she called her system of philosophy, upon all 
the races of the world. 

Among her schemes was one called Mittel- 
Europa, which embraced the formation of a huge 
central European empire, stretching from the Eng- 
lish Channel southeastwardly through Austria, the 
Balkan States, and Turkey, to Bagdad and thence 
to the head of the Persian Gulf. In preparation 
for this plan of a middle-European empire the 
kaiser had already visited Turkey and reached 
a secret understanding with the rulers of that 
country, while German capitalists had secured a 
concession to build what is known as the Berlin- 
to-Bagdad Railway, to run from Berlin via Vienna 
and Constantinople to Bagdad and the Persian 
Gulf. This road was designed not only to de- 
velop a huge trade with the Far East, but to be 
used as a military highway for attacking England 
in India. A branch line from Aleppo ran down 
through Damascus to Jerusalem, pointing toward 
England's great waterway to the east, the Suez 
Canal. When war broke out, a large part of this 
Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad had been completed. 

In order fully to control this road, however, it 
was necessary that Germany, or her vassal, Aus- 
tria, should control the Balkan states of Serbia 
and Bulgaria, through portions of whose terri- 
tory the road was obliged to run. As events later 
proved, Germany was able to control Bulgaria 



THE CAUSES 13 

by means of a secret treaty, promising that coun- 
try large increases in territory in case of a suc- 
cessful war. But Bulgaria and Serbia were bitter 
enemies, as a result of the former's defeat by Ser- 
bia in the second Balkan War, and the Serbians 
knew that the territory Germany had promised 
to Bulgaria was to be taken from them. Hence 
the control of Serbia by Germany and Austria 
became a very difficult matter. 

Serbia is inhabited by an ancient and brave 
people belonging to the great Slavic race, which 
also inhabits the greater part of Russia. Serbia 
had once been much larger, and the two Austrian 
provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, unwarrant- 
ably seized by Austria some years before, were 
largely inhabited by people of her race. It was 
her dream to get these provinces away from 
Austria, whom she hated because the latter had 
persistently thwarted her desire to obtain a port 
on the Adriatic Sea, but Austria was bitterly op- 
posed to a greater Serbia. Here again we observe 
how the arbitrary oppression of one race by an- 
other brought about enmity and ill feeling. 

The Bulgarians were also largely Slavic, and 
the people of that country had little desire for an 
alliance with their national enemy Turkey, but this 
alliance was brought about by another autocratic 
ruler, not a Bulgarian by birth, the Emperor (or, 
as he called himself, "Czar") Ferdinand of Bul- 
garia, a crafty and unscrupulous monarch who 



14 THE BATTLE OP THE NATIONS 

thought of himself as a miniature kaiser, and 
dreamed of becoming more powerful by extend- 
ing his rule over the peoples of other countries 
who did not desire it. 

Russia, being of the same race as the Serbians, 
naturally felt a deep sympathy for them and their 
national aspirations. She also had another and 
more selfish reason for taking their part. Ever 
since the foundation of the Eussian Empire by 
Peter the Great it had been the wish of that coun- 
try to obtain possession of Constantinople. 
Hemmed in by the nations of western Europe, 
Eussia had no outlet to the sea in the west except 
the port of Archangel, far to the north and use- 
less for a large part of the year on account of the 
ice. She wished to possess Constantinople in or- 
der to send her ships, laden with grain, oil, and 
other commodities, from the Black Sea to the Med- 
iterranean by way of the Straits of the Darda- 
nelles, upon which Constantinople is situated. 
But the possession of Constantinople by Eussia 
would have blocked at once Germany's plans for 
a great empire stretching through Asia Minor 
to the Persian Gulf. Hence Eussia and Germany 
used the Balkan States as pawns, to checkmate 
each other in their political schemes. Even Eng- 
land in the past, before the establishing of cordial 
relations with France and Eussia, had played this 
despicable game, and her statesmen had inva- 
riably supported the Turks and refused to allow 



THE CAUSES 15 

them to be driven out of Europe, because she did 
not wish either Russia, or Germany and Austria, 
to obtain possession of Constantinople, fearing 
that her trade with the East would be menaced. 
All this wretched business of playing politics 
with nations as pawns is in the highest degree 
immoral and wrong, and the world has reason to 
hope that the great war has finally put an end 
to it. 

Such were the conditions of the various states 
of Europe when the fateful year of 1914 began. 
Germany, who had built up an enormous foreign 
trade in manufactured articles of all sorts, had 
become the most powerful nation on the conti- 
nent of Europe. The low-grade iron ores in Lor- 
raine, one of the provinces taken from France in 
1871, had suddenly become very valuable, owing 
to new methods which were discovered for smelt- 
ing them. Germany found herself producing al- 
most as much steel as England, and far more than 
France. She had built a powerful navy, second 
only to that of England in size, and her merchant 
ships, under the flags of the great North-German- 
Lloyd and Hamburg-American lines, were to be 
found in every port of the globe. But still she 
was not satisfied. It was not enough to be great 
commercially; she wished to rule. Hor plans for 
launching the middle-European empire were ripe, 
and only the national aspirations of the Serbian 
people and their brothers in Austria stood in her 



16 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

way. The kaiser and his military party decided 
that Serbia must be eliminated. 

To get Serbia out of the way it was necessary 
to find an excuse to attack her. Such matters have 
never been difficult, where kings are concerned, 
and in June, 1914, fate, or, as some think, the 
manipulations of German and Austrian agents, 
provided the excuse that was needed. The Arch- 
duke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian 
throne, and his wife, visiting Sarajevo, the capital 
of Bosnia, were assassinated by a mad student, who 
happened to be a Serbian. It did not take the 
kaiser and his advisors long to find in this event the 
opportunity they desired, if indeed they had not 
actually created it. It was contended by Germany 
and Austria that the act of the mad student had the 
secret approval of the Serbian Government, and 
was part of an organized plan to attack the Aus- 
trian monarchy and free Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
It was therefore decided to have Austria make de- 
mands upon Serbia so impossible and humiliating 
that no self-respecting nation could possibly sub- 
mit to them, whereupon, having refused these de- 
mands, she would at once be set upon and con- 
quered. If Russia, Serbia's friend, attempted to 
interfere, Germany would come to Austria's aid 
and keep Russia off. If Russia refused to be ter- 
rified by Germany, and with the help of her ally 
France opposed Germany's schemes, a general 
European war would result. The kaiser and his 



THE CAUSES 17 

supporters doubtless weighed the case carefully 
and decided that "The Day" had come. They 
wanted war because they were ready for war, and 
believed that Germany would win a quick and de- 
cisive victory. England, they thought, would not 
come in; they would take care of her when they 
had finished with Russia and France. Austria 
was therefore instructed to send a note to Serbia, 
making demands of the most insulting and impos- 
sible nature. Almost as soon as the note was 
sent, Germany and Austria began secret prepara- 
tions for war. 

From what has gone before it is clear that the 
basic causes of the great war are to be found in 
the pernicious doctrine of the divine right of 
kings, whereby autocratic rulers arrogated to 
themselves the right to govern other peoples with- 
out their wish or consent. This system found its 
highest development in the governments of Ger- 
many, Austria, and Turkey. The personal ambi- 
tion of the kaiser to rule the world was but an 
extreme manifestation of it. His conception of 
the state was that of a collection of obedient and 
industrious slaves, under the sole rule of one man 
— himself. The democracies of England, France, 
and the United States were based on the opposite 
theory, that of rule by the people. It was inevi- 
table that in time these two theories should clash. 
It was asserted, in the beginning, that the war was 
merely a duel between Germany and England for 



18 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

the commercial supremacy of the world, but this 
is not true. Germany could have obtained such 
supremacy by peaceful means — was in fact already 
far on the road to obtaining it when the war be- 
gan. She wanted actual rule, actual power, over 
other races, and Serbia was merely the first vic- 
tim. Such attempts to enslave other peoples nat- 
urally bring about resistance, a struggle to be free, 
and before the great war ended this cry for free- 
dom had been heard around the globe ; and the re- 
sistance of Serbia to Austria had developed into 
a struggle of oppressed peoples everywhere 
against their rulers, of democracy against autoc- 
racy, even in the ranks of the Allies themselves. 
In its largest aspect, the great war was a world 
revolution. 

The German viewpoint, of course, was very dif- 
ferent. Germany's leaders held that she must 
maintain a great army because she was surrounded 
on all sides by jealous enemies. Russia was re- 
garded as a constant menace, since the Slav na- 
tional aspirations ran counter to those of Ger- 
many. England and France were held to be en- 
vious of the growing commercial power of the 
German Empire. The kaiser and his supporters 
contended that Great Britain and the other Euro- 
pean nations had seized all the overseas terri- 
tories from which the raw materials of commerce 
could be obtained, and that the German people, 
just coming to the zenith of their power, should 



THE CAUSES 19 

possess some of these sources of supply. The 
Germans were multiplying rapidly, and needed 
room for expansion. They felt that there should 
be colonies under the German flag, as there were 
under the flag of England. What right had the 
British to govern Australia, India, Egypt, the Ger- 
man statesmen asked, when Germany could govern 
them so much better? There was much talk about 
the " freedom of the seas." England, by reason 
of her powerful navy, her coaling-stations all over 
the world, controlled the trade routes. Germany 
chafed at this control, although there is no evi- 
dence that it was ever used in times of peace to 
hamper in any way her foreign commerce. It is 
perhaps possible to understand that a young and 
virile nation, dreaming of world power, might 
question the right of older nations to control vast 
sections of the globe by reason of prior conquest, 
but Germany could have hoped to replace Great 
Britain or France in this respect only by reason 
of superior ability to govern subject races and 
this ability she had never shown. Had she shown 
it, the British Empire would have collapsed at the 
first breath of war. That it did not do so is per- 
haps the best answer to German claims for world 
domination. 



CHAPTEE n 

THE BEGINNING OF THE WAB 

OF all the nations of Europe which we have 
mentioned in the preceding chapter, Bel- 
gium was perhaps the most peaceable. More 
densely populated than any other country in the 
world, devoted to industry of every sort, Belgium 
when the war began was quietly pursuing her 
way, happily governed by her democratic king, 
Albert, asking nothing from her neighbors except 
to be let alone. 

Owing to her geographical position, Belgium 
had been the "cock-pit of Europe" for centuries. 
Wars had been fought upon the fields of Flanders 
ever since the days of Julius Caesar and before. 
The epoch-making Battle of Waterloo took place 
almost within hearing of her capital city, Brussels. 
To free Belgium from the perpetual danger of 
war the great nations of Europe made, early in 
the last century, a solemn treaty guaranteeing her 
neutrality; that is, agreeing among themselves 
that in case of war troops were not to be moved 
into Belgian territory. Germany was one of the 
powers that signed this treaty, and the world at 
large supposed that she would prove faithful to 

her obligations. 

20 



THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR 21 

So confident was France that the neutrality of 
Belgium would be respected in case of war that 
she took no steps to fortify her Belgian frontier. 
All of France's great border fortresses, such as 
Verdun, Epinal, Belfort, were situated along her 
eastern frontier, where her territory joined that 
of Germany. It did not occur to the French peo- 
ple that Germany would ever dare to attack them 
by way of Belgium. One wonders at this confi- 
dence on the part of the French, since many books 
published in Germany dealing with the coming 
war had declared that Germany would certainly 
attack through Belgium, and great German mili- 
tary railroads running up to the Belgian frontier 
had been constructed solely for use in war. Eng- 
land did not feel so sure of Germany, and had 
already discussed with the Belgian military lead- 
ers what steps they should take in case Germany 
proved false to her trust. 

When the outrageous demands made by Aus- 
tria upon Serbia were sent to Belgrade, the Kaiser 
of Germany was on a yachting trip in the North 
Sea. It is said that he embarked upon this trip 
in order to make the world believe he had no 
thought of war. But just before his departure 
a great council was held in his palace at Potsdam, 
near Berlin, at which council the leaders of the 
nation, headed by the kaiser, secretly decided upon 
war. This council took place on the fifth of July, 
three weeks before the opening of hostilities, and 



22 THE BATTLE 0^ THE NATIONS 

is of importance as proving the falseness of Ger- 
many's claim that the war was forced upon her. 

The moment the statesmen of Europe read the 
text of the demands made by Austria upon Serbia 
they knew that one of two things must happen: 
either the Serbian people would be obliged to 
give up their freedom, and become vassals of Aus- 
tria, or a great European war must be fought. 
It was this knowledge on the part of the statesmen 
of Europe that made the final days of the month 
of July, 1914, so momentous. While the people 
of the world were going quietly about their busi- 
ness, a frightful catastrophe was impending, of 
which they knew nothing. The lives and prop- 
erty of hundreds of millions of supposedly free 
and independent human beings were being juggled 
with by a handful of professional diplomats, acting 
in secret, planning to send millions of men to their 
deaths without consulting them in the matter by so 
much as a single word. Let us hope that in the 
future quarrels between nations will be settled 
openly, with the public's knowledge and consent, 
as they are settled by the people of the United 
States, acting through their President and elected 
representatives in Congress. If the great war 
marks the end of rule by autocracy, it has in all 
probability also done away with the evils of secret 
diplomacy. 

Serbia, on receiving Austria's demands, did her 
utmost to satisfy them, and thus preserve peace. 



THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR 23 

She accepted all the terms and conditions de- 
manded of her except one, which involved the 
question of her sovereign rights as a nation, and 
this question she was willing to leave to The 
Hague Peace Tribunal, or to the great nations of 
Europe to decide. Austria, however, demanded 
immediate and absolute submission. 

Meanwhile, many notes, telegrams, and appeals 
were being sent between the capitals of Europe, 
but Germany, confident in the strength of her 
army, opposed every offer which might lead to 
peace. She insisted that the other nations of 
Europe had nothing whatever to do with a pri- 
vate quarrel between Austria and Serbia, and 
virtually told the world to keep its hands off, 
threatening that those who did not do so would 
have to reckon with her. In spite of all appeals, 
Austria on July 28, 1914, declared war on Serbia, 
and proceeded to attack Belgrade. 

Russia, deeply concerned with the fate of her 
Slavic brothers in Serbia, began to prepare for 
war, and informed Austria that she would take 
Serbia's part. Germany instantly notified Rus- 
sia that if she opposed Austria, she would have to 
face Germany as well. France, Russia's ally, 
stood ready to go to her aid. England, in no way 
prepared for war except on the sea, hesitated, 
hoping until the last moment that a general Eu- 
ropean conflict might be averted. Her statesmen 
made numerous proposals for settling the dis- 



24 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

pute, but Germany would listen to none of them. 
She had decided upon war. 

Pretending to believe that French airmen had 
dropped bombs on German cities (which, as was 
later shown, they had not done) Germany asserted 
that she had been attacked, and set her armies in 
motion. On August 1 she declared war on Rus- 
sia. Her troops at once crossed the frontiers of 
the neutral state of Luxemburg, and a little later, 
in spite of her solemn obligations, invaded Bel- 
gium. The Belgian Government was informed 
that if the German armies were permitted to pass 
through the country unmolested Belgium would 
suffer no injury, but that if resistance were offered 
she would be destroyed. 

As a neutral state, it was Belgium's duty to 
refuse passage to German troops. Not to have 
done so would have been to give up her neutral- 
ity and side with Germany. True to her obliga- 
tions, Belgium heroically resolved to resist the 
invader. Her king sent word to the kaiser that 
Belgium would fight for her rights. As a result 
German troops began to devastate the country 
with fire and sword, thus committing one of the 
greatest crimes in history. 

England, from the first to the fourth day of 
August, 1914, had hoped that a conflict might be 
avoided, or at least be confined to the territories 
of Austria and Serbia. Even when, on August 3, 
Germany declared war on France, she still strove 



THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR 25 

to avoid a general European conflict. But when 
Germany, in order to attack Russia's ally, France, 
invaded Belgium, the people of the British Empire 
rose in wrath and demanded war. England, they 
said, had given her word to defend Belgium in 
case of attack, and England's word must be made 
good. Democratic to the core, the people of this 
great nation were unwilling to stand by and see 
a small and peaceful country invaded, crushed, 
to satisfy Germany's ambitions. When the Ger- 
man chancellor declared in a public address that 
"necessity knows no law" and that Germany in 
order to win would "hack her way through" re- 
gardless of consequences, when this same chan- 
cellor told the British Ambassador that he did not 
believe England would go to war for the sake of 
"a scrap of paper," meaning thereby the treaty 
guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, England, 
on August 4, 1914, declared war on Germany, and 
the greatest conflict in the world's history was 
under way. 

England, France, and Russia, known as the 
"Entente" powers, were thus arrayed against 
Germany and Austria. Italy, although a member 
of the Triple Alliance, refused to take part in the 
conflict along with its two other members, since 
the provisions of that alliance stipulated that it 
was for defense only, and Italy maintained that 
Germany and Austria had not been attacked. 



CHAPTER III 

Germany's war plans 

THE plan of the German military leaders, when 
the war began, was a simple one, and one 
that their "great general staff," as the head of the 
army was called, had worked out to the last detail, 
as carefully as a railroad official might work out 
the schedule by which to run his trains. This plan 
was to attack France by way of Belgium and Lux- 
emburg, with an army so strong as to be irresisti- 
ble, to capture Paris during the first few weeks 
of the war and thus render France helpless, and 
then to turn her forces against Russia. 

Germany knew that the Russians, France's al- 
lies, would attack her in the East as soon as the 
armies of the czar were ready to fight, but she 
believed that the Russian Army would not be ready 
for many weeks, and by that time she would have 
beaten France to her knees. 

In spite of her careful calculations, however, 
Germany made three great mistakes at the very 
beginning of the war, and these mistakes in the 
long run caused her final defeat. 

The first of these mistakes was to think that it 
would take the Russian armies so long a time to 
get ready to fight, to mobilize, as it is called. 

26 



GERMANY'S WAR PLANS 27 

When an army is mobilized, the men of military 
age in certain prearranged classes must be gath- 
ered at various points on the railroads throughout 
the country, supplied with uniforms, arms, and 
equipment of every sort, and then transported, 
often for very long distances, to the places chosen 
for attack. With them there must be sent ammu- 
nition, food; ambulances, doctors, and nurses for 
the wounded; artillery of every sort; horses, 
trucks, airplanes, and countless other things that 
go to make up the equipment of a modern army. 
Russia is a very large country, with few railroads, 
and Germany thought that the tremendous task of 
mobilizing her army would take much longer than 
it actually did. She expected, too, that the Aus- 
trians would be able to keep the Russians in check 
until France had been defeated, and then, by 
means of the splendid system of German military 
railroads, running from east to west, the armies 
which had beaten France would be sent to settle 
with the Russians. This was Germany's first 
great mistake. Russian armies invaded East 
Prussia within two weeks after war was declared. 
The second mistake that Germany made was 
to think that the Belgians would sacrifice the 
honor of their country and allow the German 
armies to strike a treacherous blow at France un- 
opposed. When the kaiser sent word to King 
Albert of Belgium that his country would be 
saved great suffering if he would disregard his 



28 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

obligations and permit the Germans to pass 
through Belgium peaceably, paying for any dam- 
age they might do, the gallant Belgian ruler re- 
plied that Belgium was neutral territory, that Ger- 
many had no right to cross it, and that if she 
attempted to do so, he would defend the honor 
of his country to the last. When King Albert 
made this reply to the kaiser, he knew very well 
that his little army could never hope to stop the 
mighty military machine of Germany, but he felt 
that his subjects would rather die than sacrifice 
their country's honor, and because of their splen- 
did courage at this critical time the Belgian people 
will go down in history as having committed one 
of the sublimest acts of which there is any record. 
From the moment the first German soldier set 
foot on Belgian soil, the people fought, suffered, 
and died with the utmost bravery, and as a re- 
sult the German drive toward Paris was held back 
for many days. This failure to estimate the tem- 
per of the Belgian people correctly was Germany's 
second great mistake. 

Her third mistake was to suppose that England 
would stay out of the war. The English people 
were having trouble at home on account of the 
Irish question. Some of the Irish wanted home 
rule, and England was ready to give it to them. 
Others, however, did not, and insisted upon re- 
maining under British rule. For a time it looked 
as though a civil war might result. Germany 



GERMANY'S WAR PLANS 29 

thought that England was too busy over the Irish 
question to concern herself with the neutrality of 
Belgium. But the English were not too busy to 
remember their obligations. To the glory of Eng- 
land it will always be said that she kept her word. 
Scarcely had Germany begun her savage attack 
upon Belgium, when the great British fleet put 
to sea, ready for action, and English troops began 
to pour across the Channel to aid the Belgians 
and French in the defense of their homes. This 
miscalculation with respect to England was Ger- 
many's third great mistake. 

Such, in a general way, were Germany's plans 
at the beginning of the war. Let us now say a 
few words about the German Army. 

It is well known that when the great war broke 
out Germany possessed the largest, the best- 
equipped and best-drilled army in the world. 
Germany has asserted that the war was forced 
upon her by enemies jealous of her success, that 
she took up arms to defend her existence. If any 
evidence were needed to disprove this claim, it 
would be found in the fact that when the war be- 
gan Germany was ready for it in every particular, 
and no other nation in Europe was. 

Her army, as has been said, was an army of 
the people. Every man in the German Empire 
physically able to bear arms was obliged by law 
to serve his term in the ranks. A similar system 
existed in France and other continental countries, 



30 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

but not in England, which depended for her safety 
upon her navy. Owing to her great population, 
Germany at all times had an immense number of 
troops under arms, while by calling on her older 
men, who had already received their military train- 
ing, she could put in the field close to ten million 
men. Austria, with her large population trained 
for military service, was not far behind, although 
her troops were of inferior quality, being largely 
drawn from Slavic and other provinces that hated 
the Austrian rule, and would fight only because 
they were compelled to do so. As for Turkey 
and Bulgaria, both of which countries later en- 
tered the war on Germany's side, each was able 
to put in the field large numbers of well-trained 
and efficient troops. 

The system of mobilizing the army in Germany 
was perfectly worked out. Every man had his 
uniform and equipment ready for him at the mili- 
tary depot in his section. When he was ordered 
into service he had only to claim his equipment 
by number, put on his uniform, shoulder his rifle, 
and join his regiment, ready to fight. Each regi- 
ment, division, army corps had its orders, pre- 
pared long in advance, and knew exactly where 
to go and what to do. Nothing was left to chance. 
Germany had not forgotten that her great general, 
Field-Marshal von Moltke, who won the war 
with France in 1870-71, had boasted that when 
that war broke out he had only to press a button 



GERMANY'S WAR PLANS 31 

on his desk and send a telegram, and his armies 
were ready to move, like some perfectly con- 
structed machine. That the German great gen- 
eral staff, when the war began in 1914, was quite 
as ready, the first weeks of August amply proved. 
But it was not alone in the organization of their 
army that the Germans showed perfection. Its 
equipment also was perfect. Not a nation of in- 
ventors themselves, the Germans displayed re- 
markable ingenuity in improving the inventions 
of others. Thus, among other things, their sci- 
entists took up the airplane, invented by Ameri- 
cans, and greatly improved it for military pur- 
poses. Germany realized to a far greater extent 
than did the other nations of Europe the value of 
the airplane as a weapon of war, and especially as 
a means of scouting over the battle-field and sig- 
naling to gunners miles in the rear the direction 
and the ranges of the objects at which they were 
to fire. In the same way one of her scientists, 
Count von Zeppelin, took up and improved the 
dirigible balloon, building huge airships as long 
as an ocean-going liner, shaped like a cigar, and 
made of silk gas-bags enclosed in a light but rigid 
framework of aluminum. These balloons, or Zep- 
pelins as they are called, were equipped with 
powerful gasolene engines and were capable of 
traveling at high speeds, even against head winds. 
They were manned by crews of thirty or more, 
were armed with small cannon, and carried explo- 



32 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

sive bombs to be dropped upon ships, cities, or 
fortifications. 

Still another branch of military equipment to 
which Germany paid great attention was the artil- 
lery. Light field-guns, of approximately three 
inches in diameter, were possessed by all armies; 
in fact, the 75-millimeter field-gun of the French, 
familiarly called the " seventy-five, " proved to be 
the best gun of its type in the war, but it was to 
the perfecting of heavy artillery that Germany 
devoted special effort. At the great Krupp works 
at Essen, as well as at the Skoda works in Aus- 
tria, experiments had been going on for a long 
time, in the development of mobile heavy howit- 
zers. The howitzer is a short, powerful gun some- 
thing like a mortar, and belongs to the high-angle 
type of artillery; that is, it is intended to be fired 
at a high angle, its shell rising into the air on a 
lofty curve and dropping upon its target from 
above. Guns with a low angle of fire, such as the 
12-, 14-, and 16-inch guns found on battle-ships, 
are fired at their targets directly, and the shells 
from them rise into the air on a very low or flat 
curve. 

There is nothing new in the howitzer, and all 
armies were equipped with such guns to a mod- 
erate extent when the war began, but nobody 
but the Germans thought of constructing howitzers 
of huge size that would at the same time be mo- 
bile, that is, readily transported at such speed as 



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«« 






[ui 



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ill 



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GERMANY'S WAR PLANS 33 

to form part of the equipment of a marching army. 
This, however, the Germans and Austrians suc- 
cessfully did, and to the general public these great 
42-centimeter and 30.5-centimeter guns seemed one 
of the marvels of the war. As a matter of fact, 
they were merely very large howitzers, ranging 
in caliber up to I6V2 inches, so constructed that 
they could be taken apart and transported in sec- 
tions on especially designed motor-trucks. These 
guns had a great range, the largest, or 42-centi- 
meter type, being able to throw a shell weighing 
approximately a ton, filled with high explosives, 
over eighteen miles. Very few of the 42-centi- 
meter type guns were built, as they were not, 
strictly speaking, mobile, and had to be set up 
on a heavy concrete base requiring several days 
to prepare. But many of the lesser sizes, ap- 
proximately 8, 10, and 12 inches in diameter of 
bore, were made ready, and accompanied the 
German and Austrian armies on their various 
campaigns. 

The purpose of these guns was as follows : The 
fortified places that Germany knew would bar her 
road to France were protected by forts of the 
Gruson type, consisting of a thick concrete em- 
placement, above which rose a low curved steel 
dome resembling the back of a tortoise, and capa- 
ble of being rotated like the turret of a battle-ship. 
These land turrets were equipped with guns, and 
were armored to withstand attack from shells of 



34 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

siege guns up to nine inches in diameter. No 
projectiles of larger size were anticipated, in 
siege operations. The Germans simply designed 
guns of larger size and longer range, which could 
stand off out of harm's way and with a few well- 
directed shots reduce any fort in the world to a 
mass of shattered masonry. 

Another type of artillery to which the Germans 
gave much attention was the machine gun. This 
is of two kinds, the heavy machine gun, mounted 
on wheels and usually drawn by a horse, and the 
lighter type, which can be carried, if necessary, 
by one man. Both consist of a rifle barrel, cooled 
by water or air to prevent it from becoming over- 
heated, into the breech of which shells are fed with 
great rapidity by means of a belt or drum. These 
guns are automatic; that is, the explosion of one 
shell supplies the power by which the empty car- 
tridge-case is ejected, the new shell forced into 
place, and fired. Their operation is thus contin- 
uous, and once the trigger is pressed, they go on 
firing of themselves, at the rate of several hun- 
dred shots a minute, until their ammunition is 
exhausted, or the barrel becomes too hot to per- 
mit of further use. 

Every nation included the machine gun in the 
equipment of its army, but the Germans, realizing 
that a few such guns carefully placed can hold off 
the attacks of an entire regiment, supplied their 



GERMANY'S WAR PLANS 35 

men with great numbers of them, and used them 
with deadly effect until the very end of the war. 

These were not all the means that Germany had 
devised in secret to win the war for which she 
had been so long preparing. Her chemists had 
experimented extensively with poisonous gases, 
which would quickly choke and kill a man when 
breathed into the lungs. These gases were either 
to be released in clouds, which the wind would 
carry into the ranks of the opposing army, or were 
to be reduced to liquid form and fired in shells, 
spreading death among the enemy. Still another 
weapon of war devised by the Germans was the 
" flame-thrower," an apparatus usually consisting 
of a cylinder with a short hose attached, to be 
carried on the back of a man. These cylinders 
contained an oil which was to be lit and thrown 
in a flaming stream upon the enemy's ranks. 

Neither of these devices was new. The chem- 
ists of England, France, and America knew quite 
as well as did those of Germany how to employ 
such methods in making war. But the civilized 
nations of the world had agreed on certain rules 
of warfare, considering it their duty to render 
wars as humane as possible, and such methods 
were held to be unlawful. The Germans, however, 
believing themselves to be superior to all other 
races, chosen by God Himself to rule the world, 
did not feel bound by these rules. Such conven- 



36 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

tions were mere "scraps of paper," which they 
felt they had the right to disregard whenever it 
suited their convenience to do so. 

Even in questions of honor the obligations which 
bound other nations seemed to mean nothing what- 
ever to the Germans. They were ready to sign 
any sort of agreement, reserving to themselves 
the right to break it whenever they saw fit. Thus 
they broke the treaty agreeing to protect the neu- 
trality of Belgium, and later on, as we shall see, 
refused to be bound by any of the rules of inter- 
national law. This fact should be carefully borne 
in mind, since it ultimately resulted in the United 
States' entering the war. 

In addition to organizing and equipping her 
army so efficiently, Germany spent a great deal 
of money upon her navy. Particularly did she 
develop another American invention, the submer- 
sible boat, or submarine. She built larger and 
more powerful boats of this type than the other 
navies of the world possessed, and planned to use 
them in sinking the ships of her enemies in order 
to offset the fact that her navy was not as yet the 
most powerful in the world. 

The other nations of Europe had also prepared 
for war, not as Germany had prepared, to conquer 
the world, but to defend themselves in case they 
were attacked. Thus France, with only about half 
the population of Germany, was obliged to main- 
tain a large standing army, and England in order 



GERMANY'S WAR PLANS 37 

to protect herself against invasion, followed a 
naval policy of building two battle-ships to any 
other nation 's one. England maintained no stand- 
ing army of the people. Military service was not 
compulsory with her. Her regular army was 
employed to do police work in India, Egypt, and 
her other overseas dominions. It was made up of 
splendid soldiers, among the best in the world, 
but there were not many of them. In addition, 
England had a volunteer force not unlike the 
National Guard of the United States. These 
troops were called Territorials. 

We thus see that Germany, ready to break any 
convention or treaty she had previously signed 
if it suited her interests to do so, confident of the 
invincibility of her army, and convinced that it 
was her mission under God's will and command 
to conquer the world, stood at the beginning of 
August, 1914, an enemy of all mankind. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE DRIVE THROUGH BELGIUM 

THE invasion of Belgium by Germany has 
been called the greatest crime in history. 
The kaiser's action in attacking a neutral coun- 
try was in itself sufficiently criminal, but the treat- 
ment accorded the helpless people of that country 
by the German armies was so cruel, so utterly be- 
yond belief, that at first the world refused to credit 
it. When the terrible facts at last became fully 
known, a wave of sympathy and anger swept over 
the civilized world. Germany had outraged every 
law of God and man. 

Some of the great leaders of military thought 
in Germany, notably Baron von der Goltz, had 
written books setting forth the theory that war, 
if made sufficiently terrible, would not last long. 
Filled with this devilish doctrine, the Germans 
tried it first upon the Belgians. The world knew 
that to treat any self-respecting nation with 
cruelty could result only in that nation's resisting 
all the more bravely; but the Germans could not 
see this, and hence they stopped at no crime, no 
matter how horrible, in order to terrify their 
opponents and cause them to lay down their arms. 
From the moment they crossed the Belgian fron- 

38 



THE DRIVE THROUGH BELGIUM 39 

tier, they began to indulge in the most unbeliev- 
able cruelties. Peaceful villages were burned ; old 
men, women, and children were shot or otherwise 
murdered by the thousands ; prisoners were killed 
or mutilated, and many other crimes, too terrible 
even to mention, were committed in the name of 
German kultur. 

The first city of any size that the Germans at- 
tacked, after they crossed the Belgian frontier at 
Verviers, was Liege, lying upon the river Meuse. 
This large town was well protected by a circle of 
twelve outlying forts of the Gruson type, built of 
concrete, with disappearing steel turrets. At first 
the Germans could make no headway against the 
determined defense of the garrison, and lost a 
large number of men. Within a few days, how- 
ever, they brought up their new heavy howitzers, 
and it required only a few shells, with their tre- 
mendous charges of high explosives, to reduce the 
forts to heaps of ruins. The world looked on in 
amazement. Never in the history of siege opera- 
tions had such huge guns been employed. When 
one of these monster projectiles descended upon 
a fort on the outskirts of Liege, the force of the 
explosion was so great that every man in the un- 
derground chambers was either killed or wounded. 
Military observers everywhere realized that in 
an hour Germany had shown there was not a 
fortified place in Europe which could be defended 
successfully against such an attack. 



40 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

It took the Germans eleven days to complete the 
reduction of the defenses of Liege, and the delay 
greatly upset their plans. Soon, however, the 
German armies began to spread all over the east- 
ern part of Belgium, pillaging, burning, and mur- 
dering as they went. In village after village, 
town after town, the horrors of war as conducted 
by the kaiser and his armies were repeated. 
When the German troops entered a place, orders 
were given to arrest a certain number of the prom- 
inent citizens. If thereafter any resistance was 
offered, if but a single shot happened to be fired 
by some outraged inhabitant, the citizens who had 
been arrested, and who were called hostages, were 
promptly shot, and in many cases the town or 
village was burned as well. The German troops, 
prepared for all emergencies, carried with them 
small tablets of compressed inflammables, which, 
when thrown into a house, ensured its destruction. 
Theft was common everywhere, and was committed 
by soldiers and officers alike, in spite of the fact 
that in civilized warfare private property is sup- 
posed to be respected. Money, household goods, 
the gold and silver vessels of the churches, furni- 
ture, ornaments, jewelry, everything that could 
be carried away, was taken and sent back to Ger- 
many. Even one of the kaiser's own sons was 
guilty of this common thievery, looting a hand- 
some chateau of its priceless tapestries, paintings, 
and other objects of art and sending them home as 



THE DRIVE THROUGH BELGIUM 41 

booty. Later on factories were stripped of their 
machinery, which was to be set up again in Ger- 
man factories. Heavy fines were imposed upon 
the Belgian and French towns and villages upon 
the least provocation. Even the bells of the 
churches, famous for their chimes, the brass and 
copper cooking-utensils of the peasants, door- 
knobs and chandeliers were seized, to be used in 
making shells, in the manufacture of which much 
copper and brass is required. No marauding 
band of savages ever acted with greater brutality. 
It is no wonder that, remembering the ravages 
made centuries earlier by the Huns under their 
famous leader Attila, the world came to call the 
present-day Germans "Huns." The kaiser had 
threatened that he would crush Belgium, and he 
did so with German thoroughness. 

The most notable case of destruction was the 
burning of Louvain. When the Germans entered 
this large and beautiful city on August 24, some 
shots were fired at them. It has never been 
clearly established whether these shots were fired 
by outraged Belgians trying to protect their 
homes, or by drunken German soldiers. But the 
German officers did not wait to find out. After 
first having a large number of the inhabitants 
shot, they ordered the place destroyed by fire, 
and this splendid city was soon little more than a 
heap of ashes. 

The terrible scenes in Louvain were repeated in 



42 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

many other places. The German armies swept 
through Belgium like a raging flood, the soldiers 
singing their battle-song "Deutschland uber 
Alles," which means Germany over everything 
and everybody. War correspondents who hap- 
pened to be in the city of Brussels when General 
von Kluck's army marched through, wrote to 
their papers that such a magnificent yet terrible 
spectacle had never before been witnessed. For 
two days and nights the seemingly endless gray- 
clad columns marched through the streets — 
strong, rugged men, shoulder to shoulder, from 
curb to curb, like some resistless torrent. Behind 
them rumbled their heavy artillery. At their 
front flew airplanes, overseeing the line of march. 
The world stood amazed at this exhibition of Ger- 
many 's strength. 

At first the drive through Belgium met with 
little opposition. The Belgians fought with the 
greatest bravery, but they were hopelessly out- 
numbered. Help was coming from England, but 
the time was short, and the moving of large bodies 
of men with their complete equipment, by water, 
is a long and complicated operation. The bulk 
of the French Army was far to the east, attempt- 
ing an invasion of Germany through Alsace-Lor- 
raine. In spite of their heroic resistance the Bel- 
gians were brushed aside, the great fortress of 
Namur, between Liege and the French frontier, 
fell after a few shots from the German heavy 



THE DRIVE THROUGH BELGIUM 43 

howitzers, and the way to Paris was open. Mean- 
while, a part of the Belgian Army had retired be- 
hind the forts of Antwerp, to the north, and the 
remainder had retreated westward toward the 
line of the river Yser, near the border between 
Belgium and France. 

A French army hurriedly sent into Belgium was 
badly defeated southwest of Namur, at Charleroi, 
and a little later the French border fortress of 
Maubeuge was besieged, and fell on September 7, 
after a determined resistance, before the heavy 
German artillery. This was the last attempt made 
by the French to hold steel and concrete forts 
against the German method of attack. The old 
theory was that the fortress would protect its 
garrison ; now it was seen that the garrison must 
protect the fortress, by operating in the open. 
We shall see a striking example of this later on, 
at the siege of Verdun. 

The French were defeated at Charleroi on Au- 
gust 23. On the same day the British Expedi- 
tionary Force, under the command of General 
(afterward Field-Marshal) Sir John French, first 
came in contact with the Germans at the Belgian 
city of Mons. 

This force, fresh from England, had been hur- 
riedly assembled, with little time for preparation, 
but it consisted of British regular troops, among 
the best-trained soldiers in the world. Their 
equipment in artillery, except in guns of the light- 



44 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

est type, was poor. It was only the advance guard 
of the British forces that met the Germans at 
Mons, two army corps, some forty thousand men 
in all. Opposed to them were three or four times 
their number of the enemy. 

History records no more splendid example of 
bravery and endurance than that shown by the 
British troops at the Battle of Mons and during 
the subsequent terrible retreat. It was impos- 
sible, of course, for these men to stop the onslaught 
of the Germans, but they checked it, held it back 
day after day, taking a huge toll in lives, and 
holding each point until their regiments were shot 
to pieces and their ammunition exhausted. 

The army of General von Kluck, which formed 
the extreme right wing of the German forces, was 
advancing in a huge semicircle through Belgium 
and France, driving to the westward in the hope 
of outflanking the French and British — that is, 
of getting around and behind them, and thus cut- 
ting them off. Had it succeeded in doing this, a 
great French and British army would have been 
captured, and Germany might have won the war. 
French reinforcements, however, were hurrying 
up from the east, and the task imposed upon the 
British was to delay von Kluck, and prevent him 
from outflanking them, until these reinforcements 
arrived. 

No troops in the world ever performed a dim- 
cult task better. This ' ' contemptible little army, ' ' 



THE DRIVE THROUGH BELGIUM 45 

as the kaiser had called it, went through one of the 
bloodiest retreats in history unconquered and un- 
dismayed. From the twenty-third of August to 
the twenty-sixth, which latter General French 
called in one of his dispatches "the most critical 
day," they fought and died, without allowing the 
Germans either to break through or to outflank 
them. From Mons through Valenciennes, Cam- 
brai, LeCateau, Marcoing, and St.-Quentin the 
British retreated, foot by foot, awaiting the re- 
inforcements which were hurrying to their sup- 
port. All through the latter part of August the 
Germans drove west and south, toward Paris, 
with the British and French "digging in" (that is, 
constructing shallow, temporary trenches), hold- 
ing their positions with dogged courage, and hop- 
ing for the day when they might in their turn 
attack. To retreat day after day taxes the spirit, 
the "morale," as it is called, of any army. Only 
the bravest and most determined troops can en- 
dure it. Such troops the Germans found barring 
their path. 

As the unfavorable news came day after day 
the world began to think that the Germans were 
invincible, and that the capture of Paris was a 
matter of but a few weeks, even days. Then 
came the greatest battle in history, the Battle of 
the Marne. 



CHAPTER V 

THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 

THE Battle of the Marne will without doubt 
be regarded by future generations as the 
greatest battle of which there is any record in his- 
tory. It is true that in some of the later battles 
of the war there were more men engaged on the 
two sides, and the losses were heavier, but the 
results of this battle were more important to civ- 
ilization than those of any other battle that has 
ever been fought. If the Germans had won it, 
they would have taken Paris, conquered France, 
and driven the small British Army (about one 
hundred and twenty thousand men) into the sea. 
This accomplished, they might readily have con- 
quered all of Europe. With Europe at their feet, 
the kaiser's dream of dominating the world might 
easily have been realized. The United States 
might even have become a German province, and 
the civilization of the future have been regulated 
according to the German idea, by which they were 
to be the masters, and the other races of the world 
their slaves. That the Germans did not win the 
Battle of the Marne was due to the heroism of the 
French, and of their British allies. 
As we have seen, the huge and splendidly 

46 



THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 47 

equipped German Army, throughout the month of 
August, drove southwest through Belgium and 
France toward Paris. After the fall of Namur, 
the armies of the kaiser crossed the river Aisne, 
in northern France, and swept irresistibly toward 
the river Marne. They advanced in many strong 
columns, of which the most westerly one was that 
of General von Kluck. Other columns came 
through Namur, through the neutral state of Lux- 
emburg in the direction of Verdun, through Lor- 
raine, by way of the great German fortress of 
Metz, and from there south, opposite Nancy and 
Belfort, to the Swiss border. All of these great 
armies converged upon Paris. The central ones 
were under the command of the kaiser's son, the 
German crown-prince. 

General (afterward Marshal) Joffre, the French 
commander-in-chief, saw at once that his plan to 
invade Germany by way of Alsace and Lorraine 
was a failure. The German attack through Bel- 
gium came as a surprise. With the bulk of his 
forces far to the east, Joffre knew that he could 
not hope to defend Paris. He therefore began 
to withdraw his troops toward the west, in order 
to bar the way to the French capital. This opera- 
tion of moving hundreds of thousands of men a 
great distance, together with their artillery and 
other equipment, was a difficult one. While it 
was under way, the bloody retreat of the English 
and French continued. Day after day the world 



48 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

waited, wondering why General Joffre did not give 
the word to stand fast, but the French general 
knew that he was not ready, and continued to order 
his armies to retreat. 

Having crossed the river Aisne, the Germans 
reached and crossed the river Marne, and Paris 
was so short a distance away that the thunder of 
the German guns was heard in its streets. There 
was no panic, but the government removed its 
offices to Bordeaux, and many persons left the 
city. Scarcely any one believed that Paris could 
be saved. 

Meanwhile a very great battle was being fought 
in the east of France, between the fortresses of 
Verdun and Nancy. The French, under General 
Castelnau, retiring after their unsuccessful at- 
tempt to invade Germany by way of the Bhine, 
were heavily attacked by German columns ad- 
vancing westward through Metz and Strasburg 
toward Nancy. The French fell back until they 
reached the line of hills along the river Meuse 
known as the Grand-Couronne, and here a great 
battle was fought. Not much was heard of it 
at the time, because the attention of the world 
was centered on Paris, but General Castelnau and 
his men defended their positions with the utmost 
bravery, with the result that the German flood 
was held back, and Verdun and Nancy remained 
in French hands. The victory was won by a 
very narrow margin; German troops succeeded 




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THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 49 

in occupying one of the outlying forts of Verdun, 
crossing the Meuse south of that city at a place 
called St.-Mihiel, of which we shall hear more, 
later. But here they were stopped, and the kaiser, 
who came to witness the fall of Nancy, was forced 
to see his troops thrown back in defeat, in spite 
of their bravery. Had Verdun and Nancy fallen, 
the Battle of the Marne could in all probability 
never have been won. In any other war this 
fighting along the Grand-Couronne would have 
ranked as an operation of the first magnitude, but 
although there were more men engaged than there 
were at "Waterloo, it was scarcely noticed, owing 
to the still greater events taking place in the 
vicinity of Paris. 

General von Kluck's army, as has been said, 
was the furthest west of all the German forces. 
The direction of his advance, toward the south- 
west, was such as to take him to a point west of 
Paris. It had been the hope of the German lead- 
ers to get around the left flank of the Allied 
armies, and crush them in upon that city. Von 
Kluck's advance was more rapid than that of the 
German center, under General von Biilow, to the 
left of him, and early in September he reached 
a point less than twenty miles from Paris, and 
almost within sight of its outlying forts. Sud- 
denly, to the astonishment of every one, von Kluck 
swung his forces toward the southeast, and be- 
gan to march directly across the front of the 



50 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

defenses of Paris in the direction of Meaux. 

This maneuver has been variously explained. 
By some it is contended that having got "out of 
touch," as it is called, with von Billow's armies 
to the east, von Kluck had to move eastward and 
thus close up the gap. By others it is held that 
the purpose of the manceuver, since the Allies 
could not be outflanked, was to drive a wedge be- 
tween the French to the north of Paris, and that 
city, thus cutting them off from their base. It 
was in any event a dangerous move, as it ex- 
posed von Kluck 's right flank to attack by the 
British and French forces on the west. There 
is no doubt that the German general staff, which 
ordered the movement, greatly underestimated the 
strength of the British and French at this point. 
Their armies, concealed in the woods, had escaped 
observation by the German aircraft. General von 
Kluck 's change of front gave General Joffre, the 
French commander-in-chief, the opportunity for 
which he had been waiting. 

To understand thoroughly the events which now 
followed, one must bear several points in mind. 
In the first place, the Allies had up to now been 
greatly outnumbered. They also lacked heavy 
artillery, and were worn out by their long and 
grueling retreat. Soldiers who fall back day after 
day inevitably become discouraged. The Ger- 
mans, on the other hand, were flushed with vic- 
tory. Paris seemed within their grasp. 



THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 51 

There were, however, some reinforcements 
available which General Joffre had been gather- 
ing during the final days of August. An army 
of considerable size, made up of the French troops 
in the west of France, had been assembled at 
Amiens, under the command of General Manoury. 
These troops, lying to the west of von Kluck's 
line of advance, threatened his flank. Another 
force of considerable size had been gathered within 
the fortifications of Paris itself, in order to de- 
fend the city. They were under the command 
of General Gallieni, the military governor of the 
French capital. 

The French troops to the northeast of Paris 
were commanded by General Foch, who was then 
but little known outside his own country, although 
he was destined to become the commander-in-chief 
of all the Allied forces and a Marshal of France. 
His men were directly opposite the armies of Gen- 
eral von Biilow, commanding the German right- 
center. 

On September 4, General Joffre was ready to 
strike, and issued his famous series of orders 
which culminated in an appeal to the French 
armies to die where they stood rather than yield 
another foot of French soil. The armies of the 
Republic, and their British allies, threw them- 
selves upon the foe with indescribable courage, 
determined to win a victory or die in the attempt. 

The Germans learned too late of the presence 



52 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

of General Manoury's army on their right. 
Scarcely had von Kluck turned to the southeast, 
thus exposing his flank, when Manoury's army, 
and the British under General Sir John French, 
fell upon him. At the same time General Gal- 
lieni ordered into service every taxicab and mo- 
tor-truck in Paris, and loading the garrison of 
the city upon them sent them at full speed to the 
front. General von Kluck 's armies, under this 
unexpected onslaught, fell back in retreat, thus 
uncovering the flank of von Billow's forces on 
their left. General Foch, perceiving this expo- 
sure of von Billow's flank, also attacked, at the 
same time sending to General JofTre his famous 
message, that his left wing was in confusion, his 
right crushed, and that he was therefore attack- 
ing with his center. And attack he did, not only 
upon von Billow's right flank, but later also upon 
his left, where a gap existed between the armies 
of von Biilow and of von Hausen, further to the 
east. The whole right wing of the German army 
of invasion was thrown into confusion and began 
a rapid retreat toward the river Marne, thus 
obliging the German forces further east, com- 
manded by the crown-prince, also to fall back, in 
order to preserve their line of front. 

Had the French and British been able to take 
full advantage of their victory, had they been able 
to pursue the beaten Germans as they would have 
liked, the retreat of the latter across the river 



THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 53 

Marne might have been turned into a disastrous 
rout. But they were too exhausted to press their 
victory to the utmost. Many thousands of Ger- 
mans were killed or captured as they fled north- 
ward, but their retreat was conducted with great 
skill, and they succeeded in withdrawing the bulk 
of their forces across the Marne, together with 
their heavy artillery, and still retreating, reached 
and crossed the river Aisne. Here, on the north 
bank of that river, they took refuge in a deep and 
powerful system of trenches, which had been con- 
structed in anticipation of just such an emergency. 
The German armies to the east, retiring so as to 
keep in line with those to the west, swung back- 
ward across the whole of northern France, like 
a great arm pivoted upon the French fortress of 
Verdun. As a result, the victory of the Marne 
left the Germans powerfully entrenched from Ver- 
dun westward straight across the northern part 
of France, to a point beyond the city of Soissons. 
The British and French made several attempts to 
cross the Aisne and drive the Germans from their 
trenches, but they were not in sufficient force, and 
lacked the heavy guns necessary for such work, 
and although the fighting here, called the Battle 
of the Aisne, was fierce and bloody, it did not 
result in driving the Germans back any further, 
and for nearly four years, with comparatively few 
changes, the opposing lines remained as they then 
stood. 



54 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

It has been pointed out in a previous chapter 
that Germany's three great mistakes at the be- 
ginning of the war were her failure to estimate 
correctly the temper of the Belgians, her belief 
that Russia could not mobilize her forces quickly, 
and her confidence that England would remain 
neutral. We can now see more clearly the re- 
sults of these mistakes. In the first place the 
resistance of the Belgians delayed the German 
advance long enough to permit the British to send 
an army to France. England came in, and with 
her expeditionary force of some hundred and 
twenty thousand men held back the great German 
drive toward Paris until General Joffre was able 
to bring up his reinforcements, and later contrib- 
uted greatly to the victory of the Marne. In fact, 
many persons believe that without England's aid 
that victory could never have been won. As for 
Russia, her quick invasion of East Prussia forced 
the Germans to send to their eastern front many 
men who might otherwise have been used in 
France, and it is possible had they been there, the 
result at the Marne might have been different. 

Further, the entrance of England into the con- 
flict brought with it a power which in the long 
run did more to bring about Germany's ultimate 
defeat than any other one thing. This power 
was the British Navy. Ready for action the day 
war was declared, the British fleet at once began 
a blockade of the German coast. Powerful squad- 



THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 55 

rons took positions in the North Sea for the pur- 
pose of preventing either German merchantmen 
or German war-ships from entering or leaving 
the great ports of Hamburg, Bremen, or the naval 
bases at the entrance to the Kiel Canal (which 
crosses the peninsula on which Denmark lies, by 
way of the province of Schleswig-Holstein, and 
thus connects the North and Baltic seas). Ger- 
man commerce by sea instantly ceased, and, with 
trifling exceptions, was never renewed until the 
close of the war. At the same time, the German 
war-ships were shut up in their harbors land 
could not come out without offering battle to su- 
perior forces. Meanwhile, the seas were open to 
the Allies, and millions of men, hundreds of mil- 
lions of dollars' worth of food and supplies, were 
transported between England, France, and other 
parts of the world. Without the British Navy, 
ably assisted by French and Italian, and later on 
by American fleets, the Allies could not have won 
the war. 

It is not too much to say, then, that Germany's 
three great mistakes at the very beginning of the 
war caused her final defeat. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE EACE FOR THE CHANNEL PORTS 

AS soon as the Battle of the Marne was over, 
the course of the great conflict swept rap- 
idly to the north. The strong German battle-line 
across France ended west of Soissons, and south 
of the city of Noyon. The German right flank 
therefore was left, as military men call it, ''in the 
air," that is, it was unprotected, and if the British 
and French could get around the end of that line, 
they could outflank the enemy and attack them 
in the rear. Eealizing this, General Joffre at 
once sent a force northward under the command 
of General de Maud'huy, who with a mixed army 
of French colonial troops from northern Africa, 
called Senegalese and Turcos, and some French 
volunteers called Territorials, reached Arras, 
about half-way between Noyon and the North Sea. 
The German leaders, fully aware of the danger 
which threatened them, and determined in turn 
to do to the French exactly what the French were 
trying to do to them, that is, outflank them, also 
rushed powerful forces toward the north. Troops 
of the famous Prussian Guard Corps, and picked 
regiments of Bavarians did their utmost, in a 

56 



RACE FOR THE CHANNEL PORTS 57 

series of terrific attacks, to break through the 
French lines about Arras, but General de Maud'- 
huy, with inferior forces, held them back, and the 
attacks failed. By the middle of October the 
French were entrenched securely as far north as 
Bethune, near the Belgian border, and the Allies' 
flank was for the time being safe. From Bethune 
northward to the sea stood the British and Bel- 
gians. 

This series of operations has been called the 
race for the channel ports, that is, the ports of 
Dunkirk, Calais, and Havre, on the English Chan- 
nel in northern France. The Germans wanted 
these ports for several reasons. In the first place 
their possession would have prevented the Brit- 
ish from using the short cross-channel route to 
send men and supplies to France. To reinforce 
and supply their armies by a circuitous sea trip 
to ports on the east coast of France would have 
been both difficult and dangerous. In the second 
place the Germans wanted these ports so that they 
might attack England. The English coast is 
within the range of modern guns, at Calais. In 
the third place the Germans intended, if they 
could get these ports, to keep them permanently. 
The kaiser wanted easier access to the sea. It 
irked him to think that the English Channel, the 
great waterway between the North Sea and the 
Atlantic, was dominated by his enemies the Brit- 
ish. Hence the German armies made frantic ef- 



58 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

forts to break, first the French and later on the 
British and Belgian lines which barred their way 
to the coast. 

Failing to break the French line from Arras to 
Bethune, the Germans now turned their attention 
to the Belgians and British. Having made secure 
their hold on the large French manufacturing city 
of Lille, close to the Belgian border, and having 
also now in their grasp the great iron- and coal- 
fields of Belgium and northern France, lying about 
Lens, they struck a violent blow at the Belgian 
Army along the river Yser, which empties into the 
North Sea. The operation failed. Although the 
Germans succeeded in crossing the river, and 
reaching Nieuport, they got no further. When, 
by opening the dikes along the Yser Eiver and its 
canals, the Belgians flooded the country, the Ger- 
mans found themselves operating in a territory 
that was impassable. They therefore shifted their 
attacks to a point further south, around the fa- 
mous Belgian city of Ypres. 

Two separate and determined attempts were 
made to break the British line at this point, the 
first lasting from October 20 to November 2, and 
the second from November 3 until November 17. 
For a whole month the thin British line held its 
own against furious attacks by superior numbers. 
When the earlier attacks failed, the kaiser brought 
up his crack troops, the famous Prussian Guard, 
and came himself to witness their victory, only to 



EACE FOR THE CHANNEL PORTS 50 

see them in turn fall back, beaten, before the gal- 
lant British defense. The fighting was of the most 
bitter sort; a single English division, the 7th, lost 
over 350 out of its 400 officers, and 8000 out of its 
12,000 men. Great as were the English losses, 
however, those of the Germans were greater. It 
is estimated that the attempt to take Ypres cost 
them 150,000 men. 

No troops in the world ever fought more bravely 
than did the British, and the French who came to 
their aid, about Ypres. Many of these men be- 
longed to the " contemptible little army" which 
had undergone the terrible retreat from Mons, and 
with their bodies they formed a living barrier 
which the Germans were unable to pass. Some 
were English Territorials, men fresh from the 
shop and farm, who had never seen a battle up to 
now, but had been hastily brought across the Chan- 
nel, to stand in shallow, mud-filled trenches, with- 
out adequate artillery protection, and resist the 
attacks of the flower of the German Army, 
equipped with every device that science could pro- 
vide. With the coolness of veterans they stuck 
to their positions, mowing down the Germans with 
rifle and machine-gun fire as the latter came on in 
dense masses, using their favorite close formation. 
It is said that at one point in the battle, with his 
last reserves gone, General French, the British 
commander, was about to order his men to fall 
back, and was prevented from doing so only by 



60 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

the assurances of the general in command of the 
French forces on his right that reinforcements 
were on the way. This general, of whom we have 
heard before, was Ferdinand Foch, who did such 
brilliant work at the Battle of the Marne, and who 
was later to rise to the supreme command of all 
the Allied forces. 

Future generations, with complete information 
as to the number of men engaged on both sides 
in these two great battles, will wonder that the 
Germans failed to break through ; but it should be 
remembered that battles are not won by superior 
numbers but by the courage and faith of the men 
on the firing-line, and these English, French, and 
Belgian soldiers were inspired by a divine spirit 
of sacrifice, based on the knowledge that they 
fought in a just cause, which spirit the mechan- 
ically drilled German troops lacked. The saving 
of Paris and the channel ports, and with them the 
civilization of the world, was a triumph of spir- 
itual courage over brute force. Under the influ- 
ence of such courage the commonest soldier be- 
comes a hero, and, as was the case with the Greeks 
under Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae, a 
handful of men may hold back an army. 

The close of the terrible winter of 1914—15 found 
the opposing forces locked in what now came to 
be known as trench warfare, on a line nearly four 
hundred miles long, extending from the North 
Sea to the borders of Switzerland. 



CHAPTER Vn 

OTHER EVENTS IN THE EARLY PAET OF THE WAR 

DURING the drive of the Germans through 
Belgium, as has been seen, a part of the 
Belgian Army retired behind the forts of Ant- 
werp. In October, 1914, the Germans laid siege 
to the city and captured it. 

Like Liege and Namur, Antwerp was defended 
by rings of outlying forts, and was considered one 
of the strongest fortresses in Europe. For some 
reason the lesson of the German heavy howitzers 
seemed not yet to have been perfectly grasped, for 
the English decided that Antwerp could be held, 
and sent a force of naval guns and gunners to 
assist the Belgians in its defense. The siege was 
short and decisive. The German howitzers soon 
battered the outlying forts into submission, after 
which the guns were moved up and a bombard- 
ment of the city itself was begun. With their 
buildings falling about their ears, the Belgians 
had to surrender, although the greater part of the 
garrison managed to escape, and rejoin their com- 
rades along the Yser. Some, however, together 
with the English naval forces, retreated into Hol- 
land, and were interned ; that is, held virtually as 

61 



62 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

prisoners until the end of the war. This is the 
customary procedure, under the rules of warfare, 
when fighting men of any nation are forced to 
take refuge in a neutral country. 

The siege of Antwerp is notable because it was 
here that the first instance of the use of Zeppelin 
airships in bombarding cities occurred. During 
the siege the Germans sent Zeppelins over the city 
proper, not the forts, and dropped a number of 
bombs upon the place. A hospital and several 
other buildings were destroyed, and many per- 
sons, non-combatants, were killed or wounded. 
Had the Germans dropped these bombs upon the 
forts, it would have been understandable, although 
even on this point there was some disagreement, 
under international law, but to wreck ,hospitals, 
kill helpless non-combatants, was nothing but wil- 
ful murder, without military advantage, and the 
world so denounced it. It was not long, however, 
before every one began to realize that Germany 
intended to carry on the war without any regard 
for international law whatever, and the bombing 
of cities, hospitals, and unfortified places generally 
soon became a matter of almost daily occurrence. 

While events of such tremendous importance 
were taking place in Europe, another nation en- 
tered the war, on the side of Germany and Austria. 
This nation was Turkey. 

The Turkish Empire was formed by certain 
wandering tribes of Asia known as Osmanli (from 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 63 

the name of one of their chiefs, Osman), who were 
first heard of in the Eleventh Century. Followers 
of the Prophet Mohammed, they waged cruel war 
on the Christian nations of southeastern Europe, 
and finally, under their leader Mohammed II in 
the year 1453, captured the city of Constantinople, 
the old Byzantium, and thus ended the power of 
the Eastern Roman Empire. Crossing the Dar- 
danelles, this cruel and fanatical race extended its 
conquests northward until it had brought all of 
the Balkan Peninsula under its control. Grad- 
ually, as later on the sultan's power declined, the 
Turks were forced to give up their hold on the 
several Balkan states, and Serbia, Rumania, Bul- 
garia, and finally Greece gained their independ- 
ence. Had it not been for the jealousies of the 
great European powers, as shown in a preceding 
chapter, the Turks would long ago have been com- 
pletely driven out of Europe. All this intricate 
and underground diplomatic wire-pulling consti- 
tutes a history in itself; suffice it to say that it 
remained for Germany, a supposedly Christian 
nation, to ally herself with the Turks in order to 
war on other Christian nations. 

A new party had been formed in Turkey some 
years before the opening of the great war, called 
the Young Turks, led by Enver Bey, an ambitious 
and unscrupulous politician who had received his 
education in Germany. Enver Bey succeeded in 
deposing the aged sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and 



64 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

although a new sultan was installed, he had little 
or no power, and the Young Turks proceeded to 
run the government as they saw fit. Ever since 
the visit of the kaiser to Constantinople, when he 
proclaimed himself the protector of all followers 
of the Prophet, German influence in Turkey had 
been growing stronger. The Turkish Army was 
equipped with artillery from the great Krupp 
works in Germany, and German officers came in 
large numbers to train its troops. A treaty be- 
tween Germany and Turkey probably existed, al- 
though the world did not know of it, by which 
the latter country was promised great rewards in 
case of a successful war. Egypt had once be- 
longed to the sultan, and still was nominally under 
his control, although actually governed by Eng- 
land. It would be easy, the kaiser's agents 
pointed out to the ambitious Enver Bey and his 
associates, for the sultan, who was also the head 
of the Mohammedan Church, to declare a jehad 
(or holy war, of the Mohammedans upon the Chris- 
tians), whereupon the millions of followers of the 
Prophet in Egypt, India, and elsewhere would at 
once rise in revolt against their English masters 
and slaughter them. This would enable Turkey to 
secure control of Egypt, and share with Germany 
the conquest of India and the Far East. In all 
this Germany was of course merely using Turkey 
as a tool, to further her own ends, but Enver and 
his associates, filled with pride at the thought of 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 65 

being made an ally of the powerful German kaiser, 
fell into the trap and dragged, their unhappy 
country along with them. 

At the outbreak of the war, before Turkey en- 
tered it, two German war-ships, the Goeben, a 
battle-cruiser, and the lighter cruiser Breslau, 
were on duty in the Mediterranean. Cleverly 
eluding the French and British war-ships that 
tried to capture them, they took refuge in the Dar- 
danelles. Here they should have been interned, 
by the rules of war, as has been explained, but to 
get around this the German Government sold them 
to the sultan. Whether any sale really took place 
is doubtful, but both the vessels and their crews 
were added to the Turkish Navy. This trick, 
against which the Allies in vain protested, was 
soon followed by Turkey's entrance into the war. 

England, realizing the danger which now threat- 
ened her power in the East, at once began to take 
steps to prevent Turkey from carrying out Ger- 
many's schemes. A small force of English and 
Indian troops under General Townshend was sent 
from India to Basra, at the head of the Persian 
Gulf. This city is the ancient Bassora, famous in 
the Arabian Nights as the place from which Sind- 
bad the Sailor started on so many of his voyages. 
General Townshend 's forces began a slow and dif- 
ficult advance northward up the Tigris River to- 
ward the ancient city of Bagdad, to which, we must 
remember, the Germans had been constructing 



66 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

their great Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad. The Eng- 
lish undertook their advance in order to gain pos- 
session of the terminus of this road at Bagdad. 
There were, however, uncompleted sections of it 
north of that city. We shall hear more, later, of 
this advance up the Tigris, known as the Meso- 
potamian Campaign. 

At the same time England proceeded to set aside 
the nominal ruler of Egypt, called the khedive, and 
to assume the actual governing of that country 
herself. Heretofore she had acted only in an ad- 
visory capacity, but the grave danger which threat- 
ened the Suez Canal made her action imperative. 
She also began to collect at Cairo, and along the 
line of the canal, troops from Australia and New 
Zealand as well as from India, in order to protect 
both the waterway and Egypt itself from the 
Turks. It was necessary to England that the Suez 
Canal should remain open. Many thousands of 
men from her Eastern possessions, as well as an 
enormous amount of commerce, passed through 
this canal. It was the great highway between Eu- 
rope and the East, and if Germany could have 
closed it, she would have dealt England a severe 
blow. A campaign having this as its purpose was 
already under way. A Turkish army, led by Ger- 
man officers, was advancing along the railroad 
from Aleppo, by way of Damascus and Jerusalem, 
toward the stretch of sandy desert country which 
lies to the east of the canal, and German engineers 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR (57 

were preparing to construct a railway across this 
desert, and to make provision to supply the ad- 
vancing Turkish army with water. 

Germany's attempts to start, through the sultan, 
a holy war against the Christians was a failure. 
The followers of the Prophet in India and Egypt, 
in spite of the efforts of the kaiser's secret emis- 
saries, refused to turn against the English, who 
had governed them justly and well. The Arabians 
under Turkish rule, who inhabited the country east 
of the Suez Canal and south of Palestine, not only 
refused to fight against the English but actually 
started a revolution of their own against the mis- 
rule of the sultan, through which revolution they 
later gained their independence. 

One of the great outstanding features of the 
war at this time was the way in which the people 
of England's overseas dominions rallied to her 
support. Germany had supposed, among her 
other mistakes, that Canada, Australia. New Zea- 
land, South Africa, India, would all turn against 
Great Britain as soon as war was declared. Un- 
able to hold their own colonies in Africa and else- 
where except by force, the Germans thought that 
the same thing was true of England, and could not 
understand that the British Empire was bound 
together by ties of loyalty and love, the result of 
England's splendidly free, just, and democratic 
form of government. Throughout the entire war 
the men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, 



68 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

South Africa, and India fought as devotedly, and 
contributed their money as loyally, as did those 
of England itself, and the great princes of India 
vied with one another in their efforts to show their 
devotion to the British cause. 

In Africa a great conflict began, having as its 
purpose the conquest of the German African col- 
onies. The people of England's possessions in 
South Africa were many of them Boers, of Dutch 
descent, who had been beaten by the British in a 
long war some years earlier, and it might have 
been expected that these men would seize the 
opportunity now presented to turn against the 
English, but with a few exceptions the South Afri- 
cans remained true to Great Britain, and began, 
under the leadership of the former Boer generals 
Smuts and Botha, a long and arduous campaign 
against the Germans. Other campaigns were 
started by the English, French, Belgians, and 
Portuguese (who later entered the war on the side 
of the Allies), and while the great conflict was go- 
ing on in Europe bands of native troops under 
German officers were being tracked through hun- 
dreds of miles of jungle in German East Africa, 
Southwest Africa, Togoland, and Kamerun. 

At the same time events of great importance 
were taking place in the Far East. Germany, 
envious because England and France controlled 
trading-ports in China, had determined some years 
earlier to secure possession of Chinese territory 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 69 

herself. Consequently, when, several years before 
the war, two German missionaries were killed in 
China, she used this as a pretext to demand com- 
pensation from the Chinese Government in the 
form of certain concessions, among which were a 
grant of land on the Shan-tung Peninsula, includ- 
ing the port of Tsing-Tau on Kiao-chau Bay. 
Here she spent much money in improving the port, 
building a German city, and constructing railroads 
into the interior. Beneath the guns of Tsing-Tau 
a part of the German Pacific fleet had taken refuge 
when the war broke out. 

Japan, England's ally, at once proceeded to lay 
siege to Tsing-Tau. Her troops, accompanied by 
a small force of British, began a campaign of many 
weeks, conducted with the utmost gallantry, at the 
end of which Tsing-Tau and the surrounding terri- 
tory were captured. When, at about the same 
time, the Caroline, Samoan, and other Pacific 
islands held by Germany were occupied by the 
Japanese and the Australians, Germany's last 
colonial possessions in the East were lost to her. 

At sea many stirring events were taking place. 
As has been previously pointed out, Germany de- 
pended upon her fleet of submarines to offset the 
difference in power between her navy and that of 
England. The English had, when the war broke 
out, more under-water boats than the Germans, 
but they were unable to make any very effective 
use of them, because there were no German ships 



70 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

at sea to be attacked. The British ships, on the 
contrary, were constantly exposed to such attack, 
owing to the blockade they were maintaining 
against the German coast, and the patrolling 
operations made necessary by the steady stream 
of British vessels crossing the Channel to carry 
troops and supplies to Prance. Hence there were 
many opportunities afforded the Germans to use 
their submarines, and they took prompt advantage 
of these opportunities. On September 22, 1914, 
less than a month after the beginning of the war, 
three large, although old-fashioned, British ar- 
mored cruisers were sunk, within a few moments 
of one another, off the coast of Holland. They 
were the Aboukir, the Cressy, and the Uogue, and 
with them fifteen hundred officers and men were 
lost. 

The Aboukir was torpedoed first, and when the 
other two ships went to the rescue of her drown- 
ing crew, they were in turn sent to the bottom. 
As a result of this disaster, orders were issued by 
the British Admiralty that in future no war-ship 
was to go to the assistance of another when the 
latter had been torpedoed, on account of the dan- 
ger of being herself sunk. Many persons began 
to think, when the news of this engagement became 
known, that the Germans would soon be successful 
in sinking a large part of the British Navy, but 
steps were at once taken to protect the English 
battle-ships and battle-cruisers, while the work of 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 71 

blockading and patrolling the German coast was 
left to light cruisers and torpedo-boat destroyers, 
whose speed protected them from torpedo attack. 
The U-boats, as they came to be called from the 
German name Unterseeboote (undersea boats), 
were able to make only about fourteen knots while 
traveling on the surface under their oil-engines, 
and about eight while using their electric storage- 
batteries, when submerged. There were other 
losses of war-ships on both sides, from torpedo 
attack, as the war went on, but they were never 
serious enough to be an important factor in the 
operations by sea. 

Other naval engagements of considerable impor- 
tance occurred early in the war. A small British 
squadron under Admiral Cradock was stationed 
in the Pacific. There was also in the Pacific a 
squadron of fast German cruisers under Admiral 
von Spee, armed for the most part with 8-inch 
guns in their main batteries. All of the British 
ships except the flagship Good Hope carried 6-inch 
guns, the Good Hope mounting 9.2-inch guns in her 
main battery. The two squadrons met in Novem- 
ber off the coast of Chile, and the English were 
defeated, the Good Hope and another vessel, the 
Monmouth, being sunk with all on board. The su- 
perior speed of the German vessels enabled them 
to lie off out of range of the British 6-inch guns, 
while able to make full use of their 8-inch bat- 
teries. This naval disaster stirred all England, 



72 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

and a fast and powerful battle-cruiser squadron 
under the command of Vice- Admiral Sturdee wai 
sent out to find the German fleet. The opposing 
forces met off the Falkland Islands, in the south 
Atlantic, von Spee having taken his vessels around 
the Horn. The British were at anchor in the 
harbor of Port William (Stanley Harbor) when 
the Germans came up, and it is supposed that the 
latter, who were searching for the old English 
battle-ship Canopus, known to be in that vicinity, 
were not aware of the presence of the other Eng- 
lish ships. The result of the battle was never for 
a moment doubtful. The British, with their 12- 
inch guns, pounded the German ships to pieces in 
a short time, and sent them to the bottom, with 
the exception of one light cruiser, the Dresden, 
which fled around the Horn and took refuge in a 
port of the island of Juan Fernandez, where she 
was later destroyed. 

In European waters there had been, in addition 
to the attack on the three cruisers mentioned 
above, a smart engagement in the Bight of Heli- 
goland, as the waters about that island fortress 
off the German coast are called, in which two 
small German cruisers and several torpedo-boat 
destroyers were sunk. The great fleets, however, 
were not destined to meet for nearly two years. 

On their eastern frontier, in East Prussia, the 
Germans in the autumn of 1914 won a brilliant 
victory. The Russian army under General Ren- 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 73 

nenkampf, advancing almost unopposed along the 
shores of the Baltic, sent the German population 
flying westward in terror, and threatened the for- 
tress of Konigsberg. The rumors brought to Ber- 
lin by the refugees caused great alarm. In this 
crisis the kaiser turned to one of his retired of- 
ficers, General von Hindenburg, with whom he had 
quarreled some years before. Von Hindenburg 
was especially familiar with the East Prussian 
country, and soon proved that in placing him in 
command the kaiser had made a wise choice. 
Waiting until he had received reinforcements, he 
so manceuvered his forces as to secure a position 
between General Rennenkampf 's army and an- 
other Russian force moving up from the south, 
and then attacked and beat them in detail. Ren- 
nenkampf, who should have come up to the assist- 
ance of the Russians advancing from the south, 
failed to do so ; there have been rumors of treach- 
ery on his part, but whether they were true or not, 
von Hindenburg gained a decisive victory over two 
armies which, if they had properly supported each 
other, would have outnumbered him. These two 
battles, called the battles of Tannenburg and 
Allenstein, cost the Russians over a hundred thou- 
sand men, and sent them flying back across the 
frontier in disorder. 

As a result of these victories, General von Hin- 
denburg, and General von Ludendorff, who acted 
as his chief of staff, became very popular in Ger- 



74 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

many. A great wooden statue of von Hindenburg 
was later on erected in Berlin, and the people 
eagerly paid high prices for the privilege of driv- 
ing into it nails made of iron, silver, or gold, the 
intention being thus to cover the figure com- 
pletely with metal. 

Later victories in the East so increased von 
Hindenburg 's fame that he became the idol of the 
German public, and he was ultimately made the 
head of the great German general staff, but not 
before von Moltke, who lost the Battle of the 
Marne, had given way to von Falkenhayn, who in 
turn was deposed because he lost the Battle of 
Verdun. Von Hindenburg and his chief of staff, 
von Ludendorff, finally rose to become the mili- 
tary dictators of Germany, until they, too, Went 
down in defeat, before the supreme genius of 
Marshal Ferdinand Foch. 

There were other engagements in the East dur- 
ing the autumn and winter of 1914, notably the 
capture by the Germans of the strong Russian 
fortress of Lodz, situated to the west of, and pro- 
tecting, the city of Warsaw, in Russian Poland. 
In their first attempts upon Lodz the Germans suf- 
fered a severe check, being driven back with very 
heavy losses in killed, wounded, and prisoners. 
Later, however, they brought up their heavy how- 
itzers and began a siege of the place. The power- 
ful steel and concrete forts which surrounded 
Lodz were as useless before the heavy German 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 75 

guns as had been those of Antwerp and Liege. 
In a few days the place capitulated, the Russians 
realizing the impossibility of holding it, and as a 
result the Russian armies fell back upon Warsaw. 

In the Balkan States, where the war began, the 
Austrian Army captured Belgrade without much 
difficulty early in the war, in spite of brave resist- 
ance on the part of the Serbians, but they did not 
hold it long. While advancing south toward the 
city of Nish (situated upon the Berlin-to-Bagdad 
railroad not far from where that road leaves Ser- 
bian territory and enters Bulgaria), the Austrian 
forces were suddenly attacked by the Serbians and 
driven in the greatest confusion back across the 
Danube. 

England, as time went on, began to maintain a 
more and more strict blockade of the German 
coast. No German merchant ships were at sea, 
except a few in the Baltic. It was in accordance 
with the rules of war that the Allies should pre- 
vent any supplies from reaching Germany that 
would help her armies to win the war. Such sup- 
plies are called contraband, and if vessels carry- 
ing them attempt to enter a blockaded port they 
are subject to capture. For example, Germany 
does not produce either copper or cotton, yet she 
needed great quantities of both, the copper for 
use in making cartridges and shells, the cotton for 
making guncotton, which is the base of modern 
smokeless powder. England refused to allow any 



76 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

neutral vessels to take contraband articles into 
German ports. She also refused to allow the pas- 
sage of food-stuffs intended for use by the German 
armies, and it soon became apparent that any 
foods entering Germany might either go to her 
army direct, or take the place of foods produced 
at home which had already been sent to the front. 
Therefore, it was not long before all food-stuffs 
were declared contraband, and their shipment to 
Germany forbidden. 

In spite of these restrictions, however, immense 
quantities of contraband reached Germany by way 
of Holland, Denmark, and the other neutral states 
of Europe. England could not prevent merchants 
in the United States from shipping cotton and 
grain to Holland, whence they soon found their 
way across the border into Germany. During the 
first two years of the war the importations of 
food-stuffs, cotton, metals, rubber, and a variety 
of other articles into the neutral states of Europe 
reached unheard-of proportions. 

The initial blockade instituted by England so 
angered the Germans that they at once decided 
upon a move which was contrary to all recognized 
rules of warfare. They sent out their submarines 
with orders to sink at sight any vessels, whether 
Allied or neutral, which attempted to enter British 
or French ports. Certain areas about the British 
Isles and the coast of France were declared by 
them to be war zones, forbidden waters, and they 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 77 

sent to the bottom all vessels that attempted to 
cross them. In this action by the German Gov- 
ernment may be found one of the fundamental 
problems of the war. International law, seeking 
to protect the non-combatant, had ruled that a na- 
tion at war has the right to stop and capture ves- 
sels carrying contraband, but it was especially 
provided that these vessels must first be searched, 
in order to determine whether or not there was 
contraband aboard. Then, if for any reason the 
captured vessel could not be taken into port, her 
captors were permitted to sink her, provided they 
had first used all necessary precautions to safe- 
guard the lives and property of her crew. The 
German submarines, however, carried too few men 
safely to attempt the search of a large merchant 
ship, and they could not take a vessel into port, 
even if they could capture her, because of the 
British blockade. Further, if they sank a cap- 
tured vessel because of their inability to take her 
into port, they were far too small to provide any 
refuge for her crew. Hence they began to sink, 
without either search to determine whether or not 
there was contraband aboard, or provision for the 
safety of their crews, all vessels they chanced to 
meet, and the unfortunate sailors, their personal 
belongings at the bottom of the sea, were forced 
to take their chances in open boats, often long dis- 
tances from shore, without the slightest assurance 
that they would ever reach land in safety. This 



78 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

brutal and illegal policy on Germany's part out- 
raged the civilized world, and ultimately was the 
cause of the United States' entering the war. 

In striking contrast to this action on the part 
of the German submarines was the conduct of the 
few German cruisers that happened to be at sea 
when war was declared. Of these the most fa- 
mous was the Emden, a small but very fast cruiser 
which proved for months the terror of the eastern 
seas. Her exploits would in themselves fill a vol- 
ume, but although she sank many millions of dol- 
lars' worth of shipping, there is no record of her 
having failed to make adequate provision for the 
lives of the crews manning the vessels she sank. 
After a spectacular career of three months she was 
sunk by the Australian cruiser Sydney while lying 
in harbor at the Cocos Islands, in the Indian 
Ocean, in November, 1914. Her crew fought hon- 
orably and well, and were nearly all killed. Cap- 
tain von Miiller, who commanded the vessel, was 
captured, and the English treated him with great 
respect, as a brave and honorable foe, a respect 
they were far from feeling for the commanders of 
the German submarines. 

In January, 1915, another engagement was 
fought, this time in the North Sea. A small 
squadron of German battle-cruisers suddenly ap- 
peared off the English coast and began to bombard 
some watering-places, killing a number of civilians. 
There was no military advantage to be gained by 



EARLY PART OF THE WAR 79 

doing this, and it earned for the German naval 
men the contemptuous title of "baby-killers." A 
British battle-cruiser squadron was advised of the 
presence of the German ships, and pursued them. 
A running fight ensued, at great ranges, hits being 
made at distances of over ten miles. One of the 
German battle-cruisers, the Bliicher, being slower 
than her companions, was overtaken and sunk 
with heavy loss of life. The others escaped and 
returned to their bases. 

Such, in a general way, were the conditions on 
land and sea when the campaign of 1915 began. 



CHAPTER VIII 

TRENCH AND OTHER WARFARE IN THE YEAR 1915 

AS we have seen, when the German armies re- 
treated across the river Aisne after the Bat- 
tle of the Marne, they took refuge in a system of 
trenches which had been prepared for them while 
they were making their great drive on Paris. The 
German general staff did not expect that their 
armies would ever use these trenches, since they 
looked for victory, not defeat, but being very care- 
ful, they made ready for any emergency. 

Trenches were not a new thing in warfare. 
They had been used, especially in the sieges of 
cities, for hundreds of years. But it remained 
for the Germans to develop them to the point of 
greatest efficiency. 

Their trenches along the Aisne, and later along 
the entire front from Switzerland to the North 
Sea, were not merely shallow ditches in which a 
man might stand to secure protection from rifle 
fire. On the contrary they were constructed with 
the greatest care, and upon the most scientific 
principles, and as time went on they came to be 
fortresses of the most impregnable character. 

In the first place the trench was dug, not in a 

80 



TRENCH AND OTHER WARFARE 81 

straight line but in a series of zigzags, so that if 
it happened to be entered at any one point, the 
attacking forces could not shoot along the trench, 
but would be obliged to advance around continu- 
ous shoulders, behind which the defenders might 
take refuge. Also, where the nature of the ground 
permitted, the trenches were dug two and even 
three stories deep, in the form of great under- 
ground cellars, or dugouts, into which the troops 
holding them might retire in safety during a bom- 
bardment. Where the dugouts were not so deep, 
their roofs were made of steel and concrete, or 
heavy timbers covered with earth and bags of 
sand. In some cases they were lined with con- 
crete, floored like the rooms of a house, lighted 
by electricity, and furnished with beds and other 
household articles taken from the houses and cha- 
teaux near by. When a bombardment started, the 
German troops retired to the safety of their dug- 
outs and only the heaviest shells could reach 
them. 

In front of the trenches was row after row of 
very heavy barbed wire, through which the enemy 
could not pass, while to the rear led deep communi- 
cating trenches, along which food, ammunition, 
and other supplies were brought up under cover 
of darkness. Later on in the development of 
trench warfare, small round concrete and steel 
forts, called "pill-boxes," were constructed by 
the Germans. These "pill-boxes" contained ma- 



82 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

chine guns, and were proof against anything ex- 
cept a direct hit by a shell of large caliber. Con- 
cealed as they were by underbrush, or earth, it was 
extremely difficult to locate them, or to hit them 
by cannon-fire at a range of several miles. The 
British lost many men in Flanders during the au- 
tumn of 1917, in attacking this form of defenses, 
but in spite of their losses the attacking troops 
would rush forward in open formation until some 
member of the party was able to throw a bomb 
through one of the ports or openings provided 
for the machine guns, thus killing every one inside. 

It has been seen that when the war began the 
German Army was the only one which was ade- 
quately provided with heavy artillery. The 
Allies at once took steps to supply their deficien- 
cies in this respect, but the construction of great 
guns of the howitzer type requires much time, and 
it was nearly two years before they were able to 
match their opponents gun for gun. 

Trench warfare brought about radical changes 
in the types of shells used, even by the light field- 
pieces. In the wars of the past shrapnel had 
been regarded as the most effective form of shell 
which could be used against an opposing army. 
A shrapnel shell is hollow, and inside it are placed 
hundreds, and in the case of the large sizes thou- 
sands, of small iron bullets. When the shell ex- 
plodes these bullets spread out over a great area, 



TRENCH AND OTHER WARFARE 83 

killing or wounding many men. But it was soon 
found that however deadly shrapnel fire might be 
against an advancing body of men, it was of very 
little use against troops sheltered in trenches. 
Lord Kitchener, head of the English War Depart- 
ment, was very severely criticized, early in the 
war, for not realizing this fact, and providing the 
army with high-explosive shells. 

A high-explosive shell is, as its name implies, 
one containing a charge of some high-powered 
explosive, such as the famous T. N. T. (trinitro- 
tuluol), which is far more deadly in its effects 
than dynamite. Such shells, rained upon a line of 
trenches, will soon reduce them to a mass of wreck- 
age, even sweeping away the barbed-wire entangle- 
ments, and in the case of the great 18-inch shells 
which the British used in the latter part of the 
war, penetrating all but the deepest dugouts and 
blowing them to pieces. 

Between the opposing lines of trenches lay a 
barren waste known as "No Man's Land," into 
which it was certain death to venture by day. At 
night scouting-parties, called patrols, were sent 
out to raid the trenches of the enemy and bring 
back prisoners, from whom information as to the 
enemy's plans might be secured. By day, sharp- 
shooters, or "snipers" as they came to be called, 
lay hidden behind trees, rocks, or in other places 
secure from observation, and picked off any mem- 



84 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

ber of the opposing forces who was careless 
enough to show his head above the parapet of his 
trench. 

The long months of trench warfare resulted in 
many new means of attack and defense being de- 
veloped. At an early period of the war the Ger- 
mans began the use of hand-grenades, or bombs, 
which consisted of small receptacles, usually of 
iron, containing charges of high explosives, at- 
tached to a handle or sling, and hurled across No 
Man's Land into the opposing trenches. The 
English and French, during the early months of 
the war, having no supply of such bombs, began 
to make them by filling discarded jam tins with 
explosives and attaching a short wick or fuse, 
which was lit when the bomb was thrown. Later 
on bombs of a more effective nature were manu- 
factured in large quantities. These improved 
bombs were exploded not by means of a lighted 
fuse but by the withdrawing of a small firing-pin. 
Once the pin was removed, the bomb would ex- 
plode in five or six seconds, which allowed the 
bomber just time to hurl it against the enemy. 
Larger bombs, called rifle-grenades, were made to 
be discharged from a soldier's rifle, being pro- 
vided with a long, slender stem or rod which fitted 
inside the gun-barrel. Many other means for 
throwing these bombs were devised, one of the 
earliest of which resembled the ancient Roman 
ballista, used for hurling stones into an enemy's 



TRENCH AND OTHER WARFARE 85 

camp. These early bomb-throwers were actuated 
by springs, and sometimes by rubber bands, in 
the manner of a boy's sling. But it was not long 
before better means of throwing bombs were de- 
vised. The English brought out the Stokes mor- 
tar, a short but very effective gun resembling noth- 
ing so much as a section of gas-pipe, but capable 
of discharging across No Man's Land a steady 
stream of bombs. Other and larger trench mor- 
tars came into use, firing great bombs weighing 
fifty or more pounds, with devastating effect. For 
a long time the men of science in the opposing 
armies vied with one another in devising means 
to make trench warfare more deadly. 

While methods of offense were thus multiplying, 
means of protecting the men against them were 
likewise developed. Not only did men go back to 
ancient times for the ballista, but armor once 
more came into use. It was found that shell frag- 
ments and shrapnel caused many head wounds, 
and it was not long before the men in the trenches 
were equipped with steel helmets, called by them 
"tin hats," which afforded great protection. 
Later on forms of body armor were used by those 
engaged in especially hazardous work, such as cut- 
ting barbed-wire entanglements. 

As a result of the war, uniforms underwent a 
great change. The Germans, prepared in every 
particular, entered the conflict wearing suits of 
gray-green, which were extremely inconspicuous, 



86 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

even at a short distance. The French in their 
blue coats and bright red trousers made excellent 
targets for the enemy, and it was not long before 
France abandoned her historic uniform, and sup 
plied her men with suits of pale, or horizon, blue. 
The British used the dull brownish-green khaki 
from the first, as later did the Americans. 

Another effect of trench warfare was to develop 
the use of underground mines. Mining and sap- 
ping had long formed a part of siege operations, 
and in trench work they were found very effective. 
Men in the various armies whose occupation in 
times of peace was that of miners, were set to 
driving long tunnels under No Man's Land, in 
order to reach points beneath the opposing 
trenches at which mines might be exploded, blow- 
ing the enemy into the air. Soldiers in listening- 
posts equipped with delicate instruments for de- 
tecting the sounds made by men working under- 
ground, were stationed at points in No Man's 
Land in order to give warning of these tunneling- 
operations, and then countermining was resorted 
to, a second tunnel from the opposing side being 
run out on a lower level, in order to blow up the 
men working in the first. 

Life in these trenches, especially during the first 
year of the war, was horrible in the extreme. 
Great hordes of rats, attracted by the presence of 
food, soon gathered, and became so bold that they 
even attacked sleeping men. Lice and vermin of 



TRENCH AND OTHER WARFARE 87 

every sort swarmed upon the soldiers' bodies, and 
in the low-lying sections of Flanders the trenches 
soon became filled with water and mud. In these 
trenches the men were obliged to stand for many 
hours at a time, exposed to the bitter cold, and 
many lost their feet and legs from freezing. The 
dead lying in No Man's Land could not be buried, 
and the air was filled with sickening stenches. 

The Germans, with their usual forethought, had 
prepared a sort of fireworks, called flares, which 
were discharged into the air at night by means of 
especially designed pistols. These flares, taking 
fire when discharged, hung suspended in the air 
for many moments, lighting up the surface of No 
Man's Land with a brilliant greenish light. They 
were especially effective in exposing the opera- 
tions of the enemy's patrols. 

In order to obtain a view of the enemy's trenches 
by day, periscopes, borrowed from the experience 
of the submarines, were adopted. These peri- 
scopes consisted merely of wooden boxes, or tubes, 
equipped with mirrors, by means of which an ob- 
server might look out over No Man's Land with- 
out being obliged to expose his head above the 
parapet of the trench. 

Along with these various developments came the 
improvement of the airship. The huge Zeppelins 
were soon found to be of little value, owing to the 
large targets they presented, but the fast-flying 
airplanes came into ever-greater use. At first, 



88 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

carrying but one or two men, they were employed 
only for scouting, but soon their size and engine- 
power were greatly increased, and the huge bomb- 
ing-plane was developed, capable of carrying up- 
ward of a ton of high explosives, to be dropped on 
enemy trenches and fortifications. Lighter ma- 
chines carrying men equipped with cameras, flew 
ceaselessly over the opposing lines, photographing 
every detail of the enemy's trenches. From these 
photographs maps were made, upon which every 
gun emplacement, "pill-box," or machine-gun 
nest was recorded, and when an attack began, the 
artillerymen used these maps in directing and 
regulating their fire. 

The ever-increasing use of the airplane for spy- 
ing out the location of the enemy's positions and 
guns soon brought into use a system of conceal- 
ment known as ' ' camouflage, ' ' from a French word 
which means, in effect, to cause an object to look 
like that which it is not. This disguising of things 
from observation soon took on large proportions. 
In its simplest form camouflage might consist of 
a few leaves or branches, spread or hung over a 
gun, so that its position might not be seen from 
above, but the science, if it may be so called, devel- 
oped rapidly under the direction of skilful artists 
on both sides. Guns and other objects were found 
to be less easily distinguished, even at short dis- 
tances, when painted in fantastic colors, and hence 
it became a common thing to see every sort of 




© Committee on Public Information 

AMERICAN OFFICER WEARING PROTECTIVE ARMOR FOUND 
IN A CAPTURED GERMAN TRENCH 



TRENCH AND OTHER WARFARE 89 

object daubed with all the colors of the rainbow. 
Before long camouflage came to be used on ships, 
not only vessels of war, but merchantmen. The 
sight of great ocean-going liners covered with 
patches of green, red, black, and yellow, in the 
manner of a crazy-quilt, would a few years earlier 
have made the observer think that he had suddenly 
gone mad. 

To hide the movement of men and supplies along 
roads exposed to the fire of the enemy, huge 
screens were erected, painted so as to give the im- 
pression of foliage, or blank walls. Artificial tree- 
trunks were constructed and set up in No Man's 
Land as hiding-places for snipers. Even the dead 
bodies of horses were imitated, in papier-mache, 
and dummy guns, soldiers, and fortifications 
were frequently employed by both sides, in order 
to deceive the observers in the air. 

The first attempts made by the English and 
French to overcome the German system of trench 
defense were failures. The loss in human life 
was huge, and the world began to think that such 
defenses could never be taken, except at prohibi- 
tive cost. It was not until the latter part of the 
war that the English and French were able to 
solve successfully the problem of trench warfare. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE WESTERN AND TURKISH FRONTS IN 1915 

THE British Regular Army was almost de- 
stroyed during the great retreat from Mons, 
the Battle of the Marne, and the defense of the 
channel ports around Ypres, and as a consequence 
Great Britain began at once to form a large new 
army. Lord Kitchener, famous for his brilliant 
work in the Sudan, and the Boer War, was now 
at the head of the War Department. All over 
England volunteers were training, and in Canada, 
Australia, New Zealand, and the other overseas 
dominions of the empire men were rallying to the 
nation's support. In France the war was accepted 
in the most heroic spirit, and while the men left 
their farms and shops to defend their country, the 
women and children took up the men's burdens. 
Deprived of a large part of her iron and coal de- 
posits, France was obliged to look to England and 
America for fuel and steel, and this placed her at 
a great disadvantage. Germany, on the contrary, 
was drawing large quantities of both from the ter- 
ritories in Belgium and France which she had 
occupied. It is estimated that without these cap- 
tured supplies the Germans could have carried on 
the war for but a few months. 

90 



WESTERN AND TURKISH FRONTS 91 

In the spring of 1915 the English made their 
first serious attempt to break through the German 
line of trenches. At the town of Neuve Chapelle 
they launched a heavy attack, capturing the en- 
emy's lines over a front of several miles. But the 
losses were huge, and military men were of the 
opinion that the few miles gained did not justify 
them. At the Battle of Loos, and in Artois, the 
results were much the same. It seemed at this 
time that the Germans could never be driven out of 
France by a frontal attack. 

During the summer the French made a similar 
attempt, on a far wider front. In the Champagne 
country, east of the city of Rheims, they sent their 
troops forward, after a terrific bombardment 
which leveled the Germans' front line of trenches. 
At first it seemed as though the French had won 
a great victory; they swept forward, not only over 
the first German lines, but even over the second 
and third, and captured many prisoners and guns, 
but when they had reached the enemy's rear lines, 
they found that they could not hold them. Con- 
centrated machine-gun and artillery fire played 
havoc in the French ranks, and after superhuman 
efforts they were obliged to fall back. Here, as 
at Neuve Chapelle, it seemed clear that the cost of 
breaking through carefully constructed trench- 
lines was prohibitive. 

Early in 1915 the Germans began the use of 
poison gas as a weapon of war, while attacking 



92 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

the British lines in the vicinity of Ypres. This 
marks the first use of such a method of warfare. 
No one had supposed that Germany or any other 
civilized nation would employ such inhuman means 
to win a war, and when, on this April morning, 
Canadian troops saw clouds of greenish vapor 
rolling toward them from the opposing trenches 
they did not at first know what it meant. They 
soon found out, however. A few moments later 
they were surrounded by choking, suffocating 
fumes which sent them reeling in every direction. 
With no means of protecting themselves, these gal- 
lant men held their ground. Hundreds were over- 
come and fell writhing in agony, gasping for 
breath, their lungs seared and burned, but the re- 
mainder held on, in spite of the retreat of the 
French colonial troops on their right, and the 
German hopes of breaking through the British 
lines and reaching Calais were once more dashed. 
Had the Germans made this gas-attack on a wider 
front, the English lines would unquestionably have 
been broken. 

Within twenty-four hours after the gas-attack 
began, English chemists had crossed the Channel, 
and with their French associates were taking steps 
to protect their men against the use of poison 
gases. Curious masks, made of cloth and rubber, 
were designed, through which the poisonous fumes 
could not penetrate. Breathing was effected 
through a tube connected with a small box in 



WESTERN AND TURKISH FRONTS 93 

which chemicals were placed, to neutralize the 
effect of the gases and render them harmless. 
Soon the gas-mask became a recognized part of 
every soldier's equipment, and masks were even 
designed for horses, so that artillery could be 
brought up during gas-attacks. 

In the East a very great operation was under- 
taken by the English, assisted by the French. 
This was the famous attack upon Constantinople 
and the Dardanelles, known as the Gallipoli Cam- 
paign. 

Owing to the progress of submarine warfare, 
the sending of food-stuffs to England and France 
was interrupted, and the Allied governments began 
to fear that a food shortage might result. There 
were known to be great stores of wheat in Russia, 
at Odessa and other ports on the Black Sea, but 
these could be brought out only by way of the 
Dardanelles, controlled by the Turks. At the 
same time the Russian armies were in need of 
ammunition and supplies of all sorts, which could 
be brought in only by way of the far northern port 
of Archangel, ice-bound during a large part of the 
year, or through the Siberian port of Vladivostok, 
on the Pacific coast, over six thousand miles away 
from the battle-front. These two considerations 
seemed to urge that an attempt be made to open 
the Dardanelles to traffic, and England therefore 
determined to force a passage of the straits. A 
fleet was sent to the eastern Mediterranean, con- 



94 THE BATTLE OP THE NATIONS 

sisting of many of the older-type battle-ships and 
cruisers. Several French war-ships also joined 
the fleet. 

After a preliminary bombardment of the forts 
at the entrance to the straits, the battle-ships en- 
tered and began a systematic reduction of the 
Turkish defenses. The attack was making good 
progress when the Turks, under the advice of their 
German officers, began to send floating mines down 
the narrow waterway. As a result, several ships 
of the attacking fleet, both British and French, 
were sunk, and the attempt was finally given up. 
It has since been said that the Turks were short 
of ammunition, and that had the bombardment 
been continued for another twenty-four hours, the 
straits would have been opened and Constanti- 
nople would have fallen. It is idle to speculate 
upon the effect such a victory would have had upon 
the course of the war; Constantinople did not fall, 
and the fleet withdrew to await the coming of 
troops. 

There is no doubt that the original attack upon 
the Dardanelles should have been made by land 
and sea forces combined. It required a great deal 
of time to bring up Australian and New Zealand 
divisions stationed in Egypt, as well as French 
and British troops from the front in France, and 
many weeks passed before the expedition was 
finally ready to begin the attack. Additional war- 
ships were sent out from England, among them 



WESTERN AND TURKISH FRONTS 95 

the new battle-ship Queen Elizabeth, mounting 
15-inch guns. At last all was ready, and under a 
terrific bombardment from the Allied fleet land- 
ings at several points were made. 

The Turks, however, during the weeks that had 
passed since the first attack, had heavily rein- 
forced their armies and strengthened their de- 
fenses. Heavy howitzers, sent from Germany and 
Austria, were mounted in the forts, able to direct 
from their stable concrete platforms a plunging 
fire upon the Allied war-ships and transports. 
Wire entanglements had been built along the shore 
down to the water's edge and beyond, while ma- 
chine guns, carefully placed and hidden, swept 
every avenue of approach. Everything had been 
done to render the Turkish positions on the Gal- 
lipoli Peninsula as nearly impregnable as human 
ingenuity could make them. When the Allied 
troops finally reached land they found themselves 
confronted by almost insurmountable obstacles. 
No troops ever fought more bravely than did 
these hardy volunteers from Australia and New 
Zealand ("Anzacs" they were called, from the 
first letters of the words ''Australian-New Zealand 
Army Corps"), as well as the English and French 
troops which supported them, but the attack was 
doomed to failure. Transports crowded with 
troops were brought up during the night, and the 
men taken ashore at daybreak by means of barges 
and lighters. Subjected to a heavy fire, many of 



96 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

these boats were sunk, and when the survivors 
reached the beaches, through wire entanglements 
built under water, they found themselves swept by 
a hail of machine-gun fire. 

In spite of these terrible conditions, the landings 
were finally made, and the Anzacs, with almost 
superhuman courage and in spite of extremely 
heavy losses, succeeded in driving the Turks back 
into the hills. The country, however, rocky and 
rough, proved almost impassable. The heat was 
terrific. There was no supply of water, and the 
arrangements for bringing it up were inadequate. 
As a result, the advance of the attacking forces 
was painfully slow. As they progressed inland, 
the difficulties which attended the bringing up of 
supplies of all sorts increased. The broken nature 
of the country provided the Turks with unusual 
opportunities for defense, and the small advances 
which the Allied troops were able to make cost 
them very heavy losses. For many weeks the at- 
tack went on, and at times it seemed as though 
success might crown the Allied efforts, but the 
Turks proved themselves brave and hard-fighting 
antagonists, and in the end the expedition was 
given up. By a skilful retreat, made without the 
Turks' knowledge, the Allied troops evacuated 
their positions on the peninsula and returned to 
their ships. This attempt to open the Dardanelles 
and take Constantinople cost the Allies over a hun- 



WESTERN AND TURKISH FRONTS 97 

dred thousand men, and was one of the most tragic 
failures of th^ war. 

We have spoken of the dropping of bombs on 
the city of Antwerp in October, 1914. In Decem- 
ber of that year, on Christmas Eve, the Germans 
gave the world another example of their policy of 
frightfulness by dropping similar bombs on Lon- 
don. Airships of the Zeppelin type crossed the 
Channel and flew over the city, leaving destruction 
and death in their wake. Many persons were 
killed or wounded, and much property was de- 
stroyed, but no military advantage was gained. 
It is supposed that by these attacks, which were 
contrary to the rules of war, the Germans hoped to 
terrify the British to such an extent that they 
would ask for peace. If this was indeed their pur- 
pose, it failed miserably. The people of England, 
and of France as well (for Paris was also given a 
taste of this kind of warfare), were not fright- 
ened in the least. On the contrary, these inhuman 
attacks made them all the more determined to 
carry on the war until Germany should be utterly 
defeated. At frequent intervals, during the next 
three years, the attacks were repeated, first with 
Zeppelins, and later on, when the latter proved 
too easy of destruction, with airplanes, and many 
hundreds of persons lost their lives, but the only 
result was to send more and more men to the 
recruiting-stations. 



98 THE BATTLE OP THE NATIONS 

From the beginning German f rightfulness was a 
boomerang which recoiled upon the heads of its 
perpetrators. It was persisted in until very 
nearly the end of the war. It was only when the 
Allies, at last goaded into retaliation, began to 
drop bombs on the German cities along the Rhine 
that the German authorities denounced the prac- 
tice as inhuman and illegal and demanded that it 
be given up by both sides. It is interesting to 
note the peculiar psychology of the Germans in 
this and other similar respects. So long as the 
bombing of cities from the air affected only their 
enemies, it was considered proper and right. 
When, however, German cities were affected, the 
practice at once became illegal. Many evidences 
of this oblique method of thinking are to be met 
with on the part of the Germans during the war. 
The explanation may possibly be found in the be- 
lief on the part of the German people that they 
were superior to other peoples, supermen, in fact, 
to whom the rules of conduct and morality prac- 
tised by the rest of the world did not apply. 

During 1915 the world was treated to still an- 
other exhibition of this policy of frightfulness 
through the use of liquid fire in war. The an- 
cients used such means to destroy the ships or 
wooden towers of their enemies, but it was left to 
the Germans to employ them against human 
beings. A story is told of a young interne in a 
British base hospital, who, when he saw the first 



WESTERN AND TURKISH FRONTS 99 

scorched and blackened victims of this horrible 
method of making war, tore off his white coat 
and rushed out to enlist, determined to do his bit 
to put a stop to such practices. 

Throughout all this time Belgium was held in 
the iron grip of the invader. Being a manufac- 
turing country, it was obliged to import the bulk 
of its food, and now, shut off from the world, it 
faced starvation. It was of course the duty of the 
Germans to feed the population of the territories 
they had occupied, but Germany, short of food- 
stuffs at home, decided to let the Belgians starve. 
Had it not been for the people of England, France, 
Holland, and the United States the situation of 
Belgium would have been desperate, but through 
the efforts of humane Englishmen and Americans, 
a commission was formed for the relief of the 
starving Belgians and great quantities of food 
were sent into the country and distributed, under 
the direction of the German authorities. Bel- 
gium's martyrdom had only just begun. She was 
later to endure not only the pangs of hunger but 
the terrors of slavery as well. 



CHAPTER X 

THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA 

THE crowning achievement of German fright- 
fulness was the sinking of the great trans- 
atlantic liner Lusitania. No other event in the 
course of the war so stirred the anger of neutral 
countries, or did so much to convince them that 
Germany was a nation of barbarians. 

On May 1, 1915, the British ship Lusitania, of 
the Cunard Line, left New York for Liverpool 
with 1257 passengers and a crew of 702 men, 
making a total of nearly 2000 men, women, and 
children aboard. She carried a general cargo of 
merchandise, and a few cases of cartridges, but no 
explosives of any sort. She was unarmed. 

As has been pointed out in a previous chapter, 
the rules of war as laid down by international law 
provide that an unarmed merchant ship cannot be 
legally sunk, in time of war, without first being 
warned, and after that searched, to determine 
whether or not she carries contraband. Further, 
if circumstances prevent her captors from taking 
her into port, they cannot sink her until every 
precaution has first been taken to provide for the 
safety of the passengers and crew, and for the 

100 



THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA 101 

preservation of their personal property. These 
rules were made in order to protect as fully as 
possible the lives and welfare of non-combatants. 

The German Government, having decided to sink 
the Lusitania, knew that it would be impossible for 
their submarines to warn the vessel of her fate. 
Had they done so, the liner would have escaped 
owing to her great speed. They therefore under- 
took to issue tills warning by publishing in the 
newspapers of America a statement advising the 
public that the waters around Great Britain and 
Ireland had been declared by them to be a war 
zone, and that persons taking passage on ships 
passing through those waters were in danger of 
losing their lives. 

One of the rights always strictly maintained by 
the United States and other nations was that which 
permitted neutral non-combatants to take passage 
on enemy merchant ships, even during the prog- 
ress of a war. It was held that no nation had the 
right to stop traffic by sea, or to prevent the citi- 
zens of neutral countries from exercising their 
right to go about their legitimate business. Hence 
Americans who were planning to cross to England 
on the Lusitania were not deterred by these news- 
paper warnings. They had the right, their gov- 
ernment told them, to cross the ocean on a peaceful 
merchant ship, and they did not propose to give 
up this right at the command of the German Gov- 
ernment. On the first of May the Lusitania set 



102 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

sail, with her large complement of passengers and 
crew. 

On May 7, when near the Irish coast, the vessel 
was torpedoed without warning, and sank in less 
than twenty minutes, with a loss of 1195 persons, 
over a hundred of whom were American citizens. 

There went up from the whole civilized world a 
cry of horror at this barbarous act, but the Ger- 
man people, instead of feeling a sense of shame, 
gloried in the deed. Throughout Germany the 
event was celebrated, school-children were given a 
holiday, and a medal was struck in honor of the 
occasion. The German Government pretended to 
believe that the vessel was armed and that it car- 
ried a cargo of ammunition, but it was shown later 
that neither of these contentions was true. 

A wave of resentment swept over America when 
the news was received, and the country came very 
near to entering the war, but the Administration 
at Washington felt that the time had not arrived, 
and the United States remained neutral. 

It became apparent to the statesmen of both 
England and France, soon after the war broke out, 
that the factories of those countries would be un- 
able to supply the immense quantities of shells 
and other materials required by modern warfare. 
Hence large orders for munitions were placed in 
the United States. It was held by international 
law to be strictly within the rights of any neutral 
nation to supply a belligerent with such materials, 



THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA 103 

the chance being taken, of course, that they might 
be captured or destroyed by the enemy while in 
transit. Germany, during previous wars, such as 
that between Spain and the United States, or be- 
tween Russia and Japan, had freely availed her- 
self of this privilege, and her great Krupp works 
at Essen had made large profits by carrying on 
trade in arms and ammunition. But when Amer- 
ica began to exercise the same right by sending 
supplies to England and France, Germany con- 
tended that the United States was helping her 
enemies, and made violent protests. 

The sinking of the Lusitania brought this ques- 
tion to a head. Although the vessel carried no 
munitions of war, the rights of American citizens 
on the high seas had been violated, and President 
Wilson at once sent a sharp note to Germany, 
demanding that she disavow the sinking, punish 
the commander of the submarine responsible for 
it, and make prompt reparation for the American 
lives which had been lost. Germany, through her 
shrewd ambassador at Washington, Count von 
Bernstorff, made a pretense of agreeing to these 
demands, but first attempted to maintain that the 
vessel was armed and carried munitions of war. 

Meanwhile, other passenger ships had been 
sunk, both before and after the loss of the Lusi- 
tania, and American lives had been sacrificed, but 
Germany explained through diplomatic channels 
that she had not ordered these sinkings, and by 



104 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

quibbling of various sorts avoided any definite 
settlement of the question. She argued that her 
use of submarines to prevent food-stuffs and sup- 
plies of any kind from reaching England was a 
measure of retaliation against the English block- 
ade, which she claimed was starving her people, 
but the facts are that the German submarine war- 
fare began before the English Government put 
into effect its policy of excluding from Germany 
all food-stuffs which might aid her enemies to win 
the war. Germany's claims on this score were 
absolutely false. 

Many persons in the United States thought that 
war should have been declared against Germany 
when the Lusitania was sunk, but after a time the 
public clamor died down, and America remained 
neutral. It was also claimed, even in Congress, 
that the United States should not help Germany's 
enemies by sending them ammunition and guns, it 
being forgotten that such supplies would have been 
sent quite as willingly to Germany, had that coun- 
try possessed any means of transporting them to 
her ports. But there were no German ships at 
sea, and hence Germany wished by influencing the 
United States to make her enemies as helpless in 
this respect as she was herself. 

Meanwhile, German spies and secret agents of 
every sort were at work, carrying on a campaign 
in the United States itself, the object of which was 
to cripple the country's trade with England and 



THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA 105 

France. Many factories engaged in making muni- 
tions of war were burned or blown up, with loss of 
life, and strikes were fomented wherever possible. 
All this work was done under the direction and 
supervision of Germany's ambassador at Wash- 
ington, Count von Bernstorff, and his military and 
naval aides, Lieutenant von Papen and Captain 
Boy-Ed. German influence in America was very 
strong, and the imperial government felt such 
confidence in it that the kaiser had the impudence 
to tell the American Ambassador at Berlin, Mr. 
Gerard, that he would "stand no nonsense from 
America," while about the same time one of his 
officials remarked that there were in the United 
States five hundred thousand German reservists, 
who would fight on the German side in case of war. 
Mr. Gerard quietly replied that there were five 
hundred thousand lamp-posts in the United States 
upon which these reservists would be promptly 
hanged. 

Such was the condition of affairs between Ger- 
many and the United States in the year 1915. 



CHAPTEE XI 

THE EASTERN FRONT DURING 1914 AND 1915 

ON the eastern front tremendous operations 
were under way during the autumn and 
winter of 1914, and throughout the year 1915. 
Russia, although checked in her advance into East 
Prussia, owing to von Hindenburg's victory at 
Tannenberg, was for a time successful in her cam- 
paign against Austria. 

The armies of the czar were, when the war 
began, under the command of the Grand-Duke 
Nicholas, a brilliant and able leader. Advancing 
with a great army across the Austrian frontier in 
August, 1914, he effectually checkmated an inva- 
sion of Russian Poland that the Austrians had 
begun, and drove their forces in the direction of 
the city of Lemberg, capital and largest city of 
Galicia, having a population of two hundred thou- 
sand. In a great battle the Austrians were de- 
feated, and the armies of the czar under Generals 
Russky and Brusiloff effected a junction at Tarno- 
pol and began a rapid advance upon Lemberg. 
Heavy fighting continued throughout the latter 
part of August and the early part of September, 
the Russian armies, directed by the Grand-Duke 
Nicholas with great strategic skill, forcing the 

106 



THE EASTERN FRONT 107 

Austrians to give way in a general retreat. On 
September 2 the Russians took Lemberg. 

Without interruption the Russian advance kept 
up. By September 8 the Russian forces were in 
touch with the enemy at the town of Rawaruska, 
west of Lemberg, where, after furious fighting, 
the Austrians were again defeated, and a little 
later, on September 14, they were driven with 
great slaughter across the river San. By the end 
of the month the Russians had conquered all of 
eastern Galicia, caused the Austrians losses of 
two hundred and fifty thousand men in killed and 
wounded, taken one hundred thousand prisoners, 
and laid siege to the fortress of Przemysl. 

Przemysl, a city of fifty thousand inhabitants, 
was strongly fortified and withstood a long siege. 
Its garrison of over a hundred thousand men made 
a brave and spirited resistance which lasted for 
seven months, and it was not until the latter part 
of the following March that it finally capitulated. 
Meanwhile the Russian armies had swept on in the 
direction of Cracow, the powerful Austrian for- 
tress on the river Vistula, and to the southwest 
had reached the line of the Carpathian Mountains, 
which form a strong natural barrier between Ga- 
licia and the plains of Hungary. By the middle 
of November the forces of the grand-duke were 
within fifteen miles of Cracow, in the north, and 
were threatening an invasion of Hungary in the 
south. The inhabitants of Cracow sent urgent ap- 



108 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

peals to Germany for aid, and Berlin began to feel 
alarmed. The advance through Cracow, directed 
toward the northwest, would if successful cut off 
the Austrian armies from their German allies and 
open the way for an attack on Germany itself. At 
this period of the war the Allies had great hopes 
that the " Russian steam-roller," as it was called, 
would before long prove the deciding factor in the 
conflict. Early in December, in answer to the 
Austrian appeals, German troops began to arrive 
to aid in the defense of Cracow. Meanwhile, the 
extreme left or southern wing of the Russian ad- 
vance had sustained some severe checks, notably 
at Czernowitz, capital of the Austrian province 
of Bukowina. 

The arrival of the German troops soon stiffened 
the Austrian resistance. Not only was the ad- 
vance upon Cracow checked, but Austrian and 
German troops, entering Galicia through the 
southern passes over the Carpathians, threatened 
to cut off the Russian raiding-parties which had 
advanced into Hungary through other passes fur- 
ther to the north, and these parties had to be 
withdrawn. The passes themselves, however, the 
Russians still held, and a series of tremendous 
battles for their possession now began. From 
Christmas Day, 1914, throughout the entire re- 
mainder of the winter furious combats, in thick 
mountain forests covered with snow, went on, with 
victory in the balance. These great battles for the 



THE EASTERN FRONT 109 

passes of the Carpathians marked a critical period 
of the war. 

Meanwhile, further to the north, the Germans 
under von Hindenburg had begun a powerful ad- 
vance through Russian Poland, which had as its 
objective the capital city of Warsaw. Lodz, as we 
have seen, had already fallen, but the Germans 
were unable to gain much ground beyond it to the 
east. 

During the winter of 1914-15, German strategy 
underwent a change. The plan to defeat France 
and then turn on Russia had failed. France was 
not defeated, and the Russians were pressing Aus- 
tria hard along the Carpathians. The German 
general staff therefore reversed its plans, and de- 
cided, while holding off France and England in the 
West, to inflict upon Russia a great defeat, and put 
that country out of the war. 

The battles for the passes of the Carpathians 
ended in the month of April, 1915, and were in ef- 
fect a Russian victory, since Russian troops still 
held two of the passes, as well as Lemberg and the 
greater part of Galicia. Przemysl had fallen to 
them and the Germans began to see that if they 
expected to defeat Russia they would be obliged to 
put forth much greater efforts than they had yet 
made. Consequently a gigantic army, provided 
with immense quantities of shells and many heavy 
guns, was sent to the eastern front from Germany, 
and united with large Austrian forces. This great 



110 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

concentration of men and materials was made in 
secret, and the campaign was entrusted to the 
command of General (afterward Field-Marshal) 
von Mackensen. Soon there took place an utter 
change in the eastern situation. 

The troops under General von Mackensen, num- 
bering over two million men, were concentrated in 
greatest force along the line of the Dunajec River. 
The opposing Russian forces at this point were 
inferior both in numbers and in equipment, espe- 
cially of the heavier types of artillery. General 
von Mackensen 's plan in this vast operation was 
literally to blast a hole through the Russian lines 
by means of his heavy guns, and then to rush 
through the opening thus made a huge force of 
men. The plan succeeded perfectly. On May 2 
a hurricane of fire was directed upon the Russian 
lines on a narrow front opposite Gorlice. In the 
course of four hours, seven hundred thousand 
shells were fired, many of them from 7-inch Krupp 
guns, others — huge projectiles, weighing half a 
ton — from the Austrian 30.5-centimeter (12-inch) 
Skodas. The Russian positions were literally 
blasted to pieces. Their lighter artillery was 
smothered. "Within a few hours the German- 
Austrian troops were entering Gorlice. For a 
depth of two miles, on a front of ten, the Russian 
lines had been penetrated. 

By some oversight the Russians had not pre- 
pared second- and third-line positions to which 



THE EASTERN FRONT 111 

they might fall back in case of defeat. The Ger- 
man and Austrian troops poured through the gap 
they had made, constantly deepening and widening 
it, and the great retreat gradually spread north 
and south, on each side of the break, as was the 
case with the Germans after their defeat before 
Paris at the Battle of the Marne. But the Ger- 
mans had their strongly prepared positions along 
the Aisne to retire to, while the Russians had 
nothing but the several rivers which lay between 
them and the frontier. They were also threatened 
by a great outflanking movement of the Germans 
and Austrians coming up from the southwest. At 
the river San the Russians turned, and with the 
utmost bravery checked the advancing enemy in a 
great battle, but nothing could stop the German 
drive. The lack of artillery was the cause of the 
Russian defeat. Steadily their lines fell back. 
By the third of June Przemysl was recaptured, 
and by the twenty-second of that month the Aus- 
tro-German forces were back in Lemberg. It was 
not long before the Russians had been completely 
driven out of western Galicia. 

This Galician campaign under General von 
Mackensen is regarded by military authorities as 
one of the most brilliant of the war. Within a 
few weeks the Russians had lost everything that 
they had gained in almost a year. It demon- 
strated to the world once more the perfection of 
the German military machine. One can form 



112 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

some idea of the size of the campaign by consid- 
ering the losses, which on the two sides amounted 
to a million men. 

While these important events were taking place 
in Galicia, others of equal importance had oc- 
curred farther north. 

The Eussians, after their defeat by von Hin- 
denburg at Tannenberg, retired across their fron- 
tiers, behind the Niemen River. German attempts 
to follow them failed. Then the Russians began a 
second invasion of East Prussia, advancing from 
their base at Grodno. The Germans, in too small 
force to take the offensive, contented themselves 
with defending their territory, and by the end of 
October, 1914, this second invasion came to an 
end. Then the Germans, having been reinforced, 
began a drive for Warsaw, which finally resulted, 
as we have seen in a previous chapter, in their 
capture of the Russian fortress of Lodz. Terrific 
fighting occurred for mile after mile east of Lodz, 
in the direction of Warsaw, all during the months 
of November and December, 1914, and January, 
1915, but the Russians defended the city with the 
greatest bravery, and by the middle of February 
the fighting had died down, and Warsaw was still 
in Russian hands. In order to weaken the Ger- 
man drive against Warsaw, the Russians began, 
late in December, a counter-drive into East Prus- 
sia, thus for the third time invading that territory. 
Crossing the river Niemen, the armies of the czar 




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Italian artillerymen hoisting a gun to the summit of Holy Mount 



THE EASTERN FRONT 113 

moved rapidly along the coast of the Baltic toward 
Konigsberg, which had been threatened earlier in 
the year by the army of General Rennenkampf. 
Again General von Hindenburg was sent to drive 
them back, and there resulted one of the most 
terrible battles of the war, called the Battle of the 
Masurian Lakes. It lasted for nine days, from 
the seventh of February, 1915, to the sixteenth, 
although the pursuit of the beaten Russians con- 
tinued for many days thereafter. 

The Masurian Lakes are a chain of small bodies 
of water connected by wide stretches of marsh- 
land, interspersed by little streams all of which 
are covered with ice in midwinter, at which season 
the battle took place. The ground was thick with 
snow, drifted by high winds, and the conditions for 
military operations were extremely difficult. The 
German forces, under von Hindenburg, numbered 
at least a hundred and fifty thousand men. The 
Russians asserted that they were double this. 
The exact number of Russian troops engaged is not 
known, but it probably was not less than two hun- 
dred thousand. Von Hindenburg put his guns 
and transport wagons on runners, and undertook 
successfully his favorite plan of outflanking the 
enemy and surrounding them. The Russians, not 
believing that they could be attacked in the midst 
of a violent snow-storm, neglected to keep proper 
watch, with the result that their right wing was 
surprised and overcome. A sudden attack upon 



114 THE BATTLE OP THE NATIONS 

their left also drove that in, and the Russian 
armies fled in confusion. By the middle of Feb- 
ruary they had been completely driven from Ger- 
man soil, and during the retreat their losses were 
very heavy, large numbers being driven into the 
lakes and marshes, which had suddenly thawed, 
and drowned. The Germans contended that the 
Russians lost a hundred thousand men, these fig- 
ures, however, being denied by their opponents. 
The fact remains that von Hindenburg gained a 
great victory, which heartened the German people 
at a time when, on both the western front and in 
Galicia, the war seemed to be going against them. 
The success at the Masurian Lakes was soon fol- 
lowed up. In April a German army in turn ad- 
vanced along the shores of the Baltic into the Rus- 
sian province of Courland, and occupied the city of 
Libau. By the end of June this force had reached 
Mitau, just a little west of the great Russian port 
of Riga, on the Baltic. This quick advance, at the 
same time that von Mackensen and his armies were 
driving the Russians out of Galicia, was, as can 
readily be seen, a dangerous menace to the north- 
ern end or flank of the long Russian line. By the 
first of July the tremendous nature of the German 
campaign against Russia was apparent. In the 
extreme north the Russian flank, resting on the 
Baltic, was threatened. In the south German and 
Austrian armies were pressing the Russian forces 
back with huge losses. Now the Germans struck 



THE EASTERN FRONT 



115 




The Eastern Front. The heavy line shows the position to which the 
Russians retreated after the fall of Warsaw in 1915. 

at the Russian center, opposite Warsaw. After 
severe fighting, the Russian fortified positions 



116 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

around Przasnysz were taken, and the armies of 
the czar fell back across the Rawka and Bzura 
rivers to a position about fifteen miles to the west 
of Warsaw. Russia was in a panic, but her sol- 
diers resisted bravely. By the end of July the 
Germans had crossed the Vistula, and on August 4 
the great fortress of Ivangorod, thirty miles south 
of Warsaw, surrendered. The city was rapidly 
being surrounded. On the same night a great 
Russian retreat began. 

The Grand-Duke Nicholas deserves the utmost 
credit for the masterly way in which he saved his 
armies. The Russians were short of ammunition, 
and also of rifles. Thousands of men went into 
battle unarmed, waiting until their comrades fell, 
in order that they might seize the guns of the 
dead and wounded. In many cases they fought 
desperately with iron bars, or even clubs. 
Against the perfectly equipped German troops 
they had no chance. We have shown in a preced- 
ing chapter what desperate efforts the British and 
French were making to force the passage of the 
Dardanelles and carry the sorely needed supplies 
to their Russian allies. Even now, however, it 
was too late. The Russian armies were in retreat 
all along the thousand-mile line from the Baltic to 
the borders of Rumania. In one of the most ti- 
tanic compaigns ever fought, in which close to 
seven million men were engaged on the two sides, 
the Germans had been the victors. 



THE EASTERN FRONT 117 

After the fall of Warsaw, the Germans pressed 
rapidly eastward into Russia. At the end of 
August the strong fortress of Brest Litovsk fell, 
and the capture of Grodno and Vilna followed. 
All the great fortresses built by the Russians 
against attacks from the west were in the enemy's 
hands, and their armies were two hundred miles 
east of Warsaw. In the north the Germans 
reached Dvinsk, on the road to Petrograd, but here 
they were stopped. In the south von Mackensen's 
armies captured the city of Pinsk, and drove the 
Russians to the line of the great Pripet Marshes. 
Here, intrenched in an almost impassable land of 
bogs, they held. By November winter had set in 
and the great retreat was over. As a result of it 
Russia for the time being was virtually out of the 
war, although she had saved her armies. The 
czar, realizing the desperate nature of the situa- 
tion, relieved the Grand-Duke Nicholas of his 
command and took charge of the armies of Russia 
himself. 



CHAPTER XII 

ITALY AND THE BALKAN STATES 

IN" the month of May, 1915, while the great drive 
of General von Mackensen in Galicia was 
thrilling the people of Germany, an event took 
place which brought joy to the Allied nations. 
Italy, which had been a member of the Triple Alli- 
ance, entered the war on the side of the Entente. 

For this action she had the following reasons. 
Italy hated Austria, the two countries having 
fought many wars in the past. She had joined the 
Triple Alliance because of disagreements with 
France over the question of Tunis, in northern 
Africa. England, however, had always been 
Italy's friend, supplying that country with many 
needed articles, among them coal. There was a 
particular reason, however, for friction between 
Italy and Austria, and it had to do with certain 
portions of Austria lying around the city of 
Trieste, at the head of the Adriatic, and also with 
certain other sections of country lying north of 
the Italian border, around the city of Trent. 
These territories were inhabited largely by Ital- 
ians, although under Austrian rule, and their peo- 
ple wished to become a part of Italy. Here again 
we see conditions leading to war, arising from the 

118 






ITALY AND THE BALKAN STATES 119 

evil system of laying out national boundaries to 
suit political purposes rather than the wishes of 
the people. The boundaries of Austria, where 
that country joined Italy, had been arranged at 
the peace table, and were so located that Austria 
would hold the mountain passes in the Trent dis- 
trict, thus being able, in case of war with Italy, to 
pour her troops down into the northern Italian 
plains. Around Trieste, on the other hand, the 
boundaries were arranged so that Austria, and not 
Italy, should possess that large seaport at the 
head of the Adriatic Sea. These boundaries were 
artificial, and the fact that the territories in ques- 
tion were racially Italian, not Austrian, made no 
difference to the autocratic rulers of the dual 
monarchy. In Italy these provinces were called 
Italia irredenta, or unredeemed Italy, and the 
Italians felt the same desire to get them back 
that the people of France felt to get back the 
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. 

In breaking with the Triple Alliance, Italy was 
technically quite within her rights. As has been 
pointed out in an earlier chapter, the terms of this 
alliance provided that Italy was to side with Aus- 
tria and Germany only in case those countries 
were attacked. She held then, what has since been 
amply proved, that Germany and Austria were not 
attacked, but that on the contrary they were the 
aggressors. But before entering the war Italy 
demanded of Austria her lost provinces. When 



120 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Austria refused to give them up, the people of 
Italy determined to take them by force of arms. 
War was declared against Austria, on May 23, 
although not against Germany until later, and the 
Italian Army was called to the colors. 

In order to attack Austria, the Italians could 
advance in but two directions. One was directly 
north, through the mountain passes, toward Trent. 
These passes, however, were, as has been said, held 
by the Austrians, who had heavily fortified them. 
Campaigning in such territory is well-nigh impos- 
sible. The defiles through the mountains, covered 
with snow for a large part of the year, could be 
held by small forces against an army Fighting 
would have to be done at times above the clouds, 
with the thermometer below zero, artillery and 
supplies being hauled up steep cliffs and moun- 
tain-sides on sleds. It was impossible for Italy 
to invade Austria in this direction with any pros- 
pect of success, and the Austrian commanders 
knew it. 

The other available direction for an advance was 
toward the east. Here the Austrian frontier was 
protected by a wide and deep river, the Isonzo. 
The Italian leaders decided to make their main 
attack eastward, across the river Isonzo toward 
Gorizia and Trieste, at the same time undertaking 
a difficult campaign northward, to secure and hold 
the mountain passes into Austria. A glance at the 
map will show that if these passes were not held, 



ITALY AND THE BALKAN STATES 121 

the Austrian forces, sweeping southward through 
them, could strike the Italians on their northern 
flank, cut their lines of communication, and get 
behind the army attacking along the Isonzo and 
capture it. 

The Italian operations were brilliantly con- 
ducted, although for a long time the world heard 
little about them. The terrific campaign north- 
ward for the possession of the mountain passes 
was carried on against almost insuperable obsta- 
cles. Roads were constructed up impassable 
mountain-sides by the brilliant Italian engineers; 
great cableways were built of wire ropes, leading 
from peak to peak, by means of which men, sup- 
plies, and guns were carried in swinging cars 
across mountain torrents and deep valleys; artil- 
lery was hauled on sledges by hundreds of men to 
the tops of rocky and snow-covered crags, while 
the men fought in Arctic temperatures with the 
greatest bravery. Slowly the Austrians were 
pushed back from the Italian frontier, as position 
after position was taken from them. 

Meanwhile, the larger campaign to the east was 
making excellent progress. In June, 1915, the 
Italians crossed the Isonzo River and began a 
rapid advance toward Gorizia. As a result, the 
Austrians were obliged to detach many men from 
their armies on the Russian front, in order to pro- 
tect their western frontier. Gorizia was besieged, 
and the Italians began a series of operations to 



122 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

obtain possession of the Carso Plateau, a rough 
and difficult series of hills and ravines lying be- 
tween them and the city of Trieste, to the south. 
During the month of August fighting went on day 
and night for the control of this plateau, the Ital- 
ians making steady progress. Around Gorizia 
terrific fighting continued throughout the entire 
autumn for the possession of Monte San Michele, 
a high hill defending the city. As the year 1915 
closed, the two armies were locked in a struggle 
of the bitterest and most sanguinary nature, with- 
out decisive results having been obtained by either 
side. 

We have left the Balkan situation without atten- 
tion since the opening of the war. Many serious 
events had taken place in the peninsula. The 
first Austrian advance into Serbia, begun in July, 
1914, was, as we have previously said, a huge fail- 
ure. Within a week after the Austrian troops 
crossed the Danube and entered Serbian territory 
they had been driven back with heavy losses. 
The heroic resistance of the Serbians astonished 
the world. 

Again the Austrians, humiliated by their unex- 
pected defeat, attacked, and again they were driven 
back, beaten and confused. Then the Austrian 
leaders prepared for a mighty effort. Reinforce- 
ments of men and guns were hurried up, and a 
third army was sent into Serbian territory. This 
attack gained some success. Belgrade, the capital 



ITALY AND THE BALKAN STATES 123 

of Serbia, was taken, and progress southward to- 
ward Nish was made. The Serbians rallied, how- 
ever, and met the Austrians in a great battle. 
Just when fortune seemed to be favoring the en- 
emy, the Serbian ruler, King Peter— a white- 
haired old man— rode among his troops and heed- 
less of danger led them against the foe. The 
Austrians broke and fled, the Serbians pursued 
them, and for the third time drove them across the 
Danube. This battle occurred in December, 1914, 
and it was not until the autumn of 1915 that Aus- 
tria again attempted the invasion of Serbia. The 
brave resistance made by this small nation in the 
defense of its liberties must always remain one of 
the most thrilling chapters of the war. 

Now, however, in October, 1915, Serbia was to 
get a taste of the sort of warfare that the Germans 
under von Mackensen had just given Russia. Be- 
fore we take up this Serbian campaign, let us see 
what had been going on in the other parts of the 
Balkans. 

The Allies, realizing the danger which would re- 
sult to their cause from a German domination of 
the Balkan States, had made many attempts to get 
Greece to join them. But the king of this country, 
Constantine, was married to a sister of the Ger- 
man Emperor, and his sympathies were all with 
the kaiser. Greece had fought with Serbia against 
Bulgaria in the second Balkan War a short time 
before and the two countries had entered into an 



124 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

alliance, under the terms of which it was Greece's 
duty to come to Serbia's assistance in case of war. 
This, however, under the influence of Oonstantine, 
she refused to do. The sympathies of the nation 
were divided. The official classes largely sided 
with the king, while the common people, led by 
Venizelos, Greece's great premier, sympathized 
with the Allies and urged the king to carry out his 
treaty obligations. Influenced by his wife, Oon- 
stantine steadily refused. 

When the Allies saw that Greece would do noth- 
ing, and that Germany and Austria were preparing 
to overrun Serbia as they had already overrun 
Belgium and the western part of Russia, they 
realized that some action would have to be taken, 
unless they were willing to give up all hold on the 
Balkan States. A fleet of war-ships was therefore 
dispatched to the Greek port of Saloniki and with 
the consent of Venizelos the port was seized, and 
troops were landed, among them forces withdrawn 
from the unsuccessful attempt upon the Darda- 
nelles. At the same time Italian troops were sent 
across the Adriatic and landed in the old Turkish 
province of Albania. The forces at Saloniki were 
increased later on, until a very large army was 
collected there, but it remained inactive for a 
a long time — in fact, until the very end of the war. 
It was a difficult matter to keep these troops sup- 
plied with food and ammunition, as virtually 
everything had to be sent out from France and 



ITALY AND THE BALKAN STATES 125 

England by water, and the Mediterranean Sea, 
through which the supply-ships were obliged to 
pass, was infested with German and Austrian 
submarines. Critics of the government in Eng- 
land and France maintained that it was a waste of 
men and money to keep these forces in Greece, 
when they were so badly needed on the western 
front, but although, as the years went by, it seemed 
that the great army at Saloniki accomplished 
nothing, the wisdom of keeping these men there 
was shown in the last few weeks of the war, when 
they won a great victory. 

In 1915 another country entered the war on the 
German side. This was Bulgaria, peopled by the 
Slavic race. Bulgaria owed her independence 
from Turkish rule to help given her by Russia, and 
her people regarded the Turks as their hereditary 
enemies. She should naturally, therefore, have 
taken sides with the Allies rather than with Ger- 
many, Austria, and Turkey. But her ruler, Ferdi- 
nand, who called himself the Bulgarian "czar," 
was a crafty and unscrupulous monarch, who was 
convinced that Germany would win the war. He 
therefore threw his country into the conflict on 
the side of the kaiser, having been promised large 
rewards in territory in return for his aid. Some 
years earlier, at the close of the first Balkan War, 
in which Bulgaria and Serbia fought side by side 
against the Turks, these two countries had quar- 
reled and fought over the possession of Macedonia, 



126 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

thus causing the second Balkan War. Rumania, 
another of the Balkan states, coming to Serbia's 
assistance, invaded Bulgaria, with the result that 
the latter country lost not only Macedonia but a 
large section of territory lying south of the 
Danube along the Bulgarian border known as the 
Dobrudja. The loss of these territories rankled 
in the Bulgarians' minds, and they saw in victory 
by Germany a chance to get them back. Early in 
October, 1915, they entered the war on the German 
side by beginning an attack upon Serbia. 

We are now ready to go back to the great drive 
through Serbia that the Germans and Austrians 
made in the autumn of 1915, the command of which 
was entrusted to General von Mackensen, who, as 
we have seen, had just broken the Russian lines 
and driven their armies out of Galicia. 

With a mixed force of Germans and Austrians, 
von Mackensen reached the Danube. His army 
numbered three hundred thousand picked men, 
and with them they brought two thousand guns. 
On September 20 a terrific bombardment of the 
Serbian positions on the south bank of the Danube 
began. Huge German and Austrian shells rained 
upon the Serbian defenses of Belgrade, blowing 
them to bits. In spite of the bravest resistance, 
von Mackensen 's men succeeded by October 6 in 
crossing the river. English naval guns and gun- 
ners, hastily sent to aid in the defense of Belgrade, 
were no more successful against the heavy German 



ITALY AND THE BALKAN STATES 127 

howitzers here than they had been at Antwerp. 
The Serbians fell back toward the south, along the 
Morava Valley, followed by the Austro-Gernians. 
Then came the sudden attack by Bulgaria from the 
east, many miles south of where the main Serbian 
army was fighting. Bulgaria's unexpected blow 
ended the Serbian hopes. Eesistance in the north, 
with the enemy tearing at their flank, was useless. 
The French and British forces at Saloniki, far to 
the south, were not strong enough to come to the 
Serbians' aid. Greece still wavered, her people 
showing increasing sympathy with the Allies, her 
king and queen looking coldly on, receiving their 
instructions from the kaiser and the great general 
staff at Berlin. Nish, close to the Bulgarian bor- 
der, and an important point on the Berlin-to-Bag- 
dad railroad, fell on November 5, and the Serbian 
capital, which had been located there since the 
fall of Belgrade, was moved to Monastir, far to 
the southwest. The French and British came into 
the battle against the Bulgarians, advancing to- 
ward Saloniki, but were barely able to hold their 
own. By the end of November the remnants of 
the gallant Serbian Army had either been driven 
westward into the desolate mountains of Albania, 
or were clinging desperately to a tiny corner of 
their country around Monastir. The Germans had 
accomplished their purpose, which was to free 
from Serbian control that portion of the Berlin-to- 
Bagdad railway running through Serbia from Bel- 



128 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

grade to Nish. With Bulgaria in league with 
them, they now had uninterrupted communication 
by rail from Berlin to Constantinople, and were 
able to send guns, ammunition, and other supplies 
to their allies the Turks. 

Meanwhile Serbia had been virtually destroyed. 
All the terrors of the Belgian invasion had been 
repeated, on an even more frightful scale. The 
population of the country — men, women, and 
children — was almost wiped out. Germans, Aus- 
trians, and Bulgarians vied with one another in 
their cruelties. Villages were destroyed, the aged 
and the children either shot or starved in intern- 
ment camps, the young girls sold into slavery. It 
has been estimated that over two thirds of the en- 
tire population perished as a result of the Austro- 
German and Bulgarian invasions. Thus, while the 
British and French were hammering unsuccess- 
fully at the German lines in the West, the East 
had been the scene of huge German successes. 
From the Gulf of Riga in the north to Constan- 
tinople in the south, the Teutonic forces had 
gained an almost uninterrupted series of victories. 
These were dark days for the cause of the Allies. 




Before the war 




The same "Kultured" 
THE FAMOUS CLOTH HALL AT YPRES, BELGIUM 




British Official Photograph 

HEAVY BRITISH TANK IN DIFFICULTIES 




© Underwood & Underwood 

A "FLEET' 



OF FRENCH WHIPPET TANKS 



CHAPTER XIII 

OTHER EVENTS IN 1915 

ONE of the results of the diplomatic battle 
which went on between Germany and the 
United States during the latter part of 1915, was 
a promise on Germany's part to sink no more pas- 
senger ships without first giving them warning. 
This promise was not kept, nor had Germany any 
intention to keep it. The world has since learned 
that her reason for making it was to gain time in 
which to build a fleet of larger and more powerful 
submarines, with which she expected to bring Eng- 
land to her knees. Her policy of sinking by 
wholesale not only enemy but neutral merchant 
ships wherever they might be found, and whatever 
they carried, whether contraband or not, had a 
double purpose. The first was to prevent food and 
munitions of war from reaching her enemies. The 
second was so to cut down the number of ships in 
the merchant fleets of the world, of which England 
owned approximately one half, that when the war 
was over the great merchant marine of the Eng- 
lish would be crippled or destroyed, while she, 
Germany, with her vessels safely lying in neutral 
harbors, could gain possession of the ocean carry- 

129 



130 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

ing-trade of the world. It is of interest to note 
that before the war was over, Germany had suc- 
ceeded in sinking almost half of the world's avail- 
able ocean-going tonnage. 

In their rage for destruction the German sub- 
marines, as we have said, did not confine their 
efforts to the ships of the Allies alone. Hundreds 
of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, and other 
neutral vessels were sent to the bottom, along with 
their crews. Such sinkings were of course illegal, 
and in ordinary circumstances would have been 
considered grounds for war, but the small neutral 
nations of Europe, after seeing what had hap- 
pened to Belgium and Serbia, were far too afraid 
of the German mailed fist to do more than weakly 
protest. They knew they were powerless, yet they 
were obliged, without recourse, month after month, 
to see their ships sunk, and hundreds, even thou- 
sands, of innocent sailors drowned. 

Not only did the German submarines sink these 
trading-ships ; often they turned their guns on the 
survivors as these tried to escape in open boats, 
and in this way many persons were killed. One 
might have supposed that even German barbarity 
could go no further, and yet the world was given 
another example of "f rightfulness." Many mer- 
chant vessels, withdrawn from trade by the Brit- 
ish and French, and put into service as hospital 
ships, were deliberately sunk. These ships were 
painted white, with great red crosses and other dis- 



OTHER EVENTS IN 1915 131 

tinguishing marks upon them to indicate their use, 
yet they were not safe from attack. In fact, they 
seemed to invite attack all the more readily be- 
cause of their markings, and later in the war the 
British were obliged to do away with the distin- 
guishing marks, and paint them like ordinary ves- 
sels, to render them even moderately safe. The 
Germans, always ready with excuses, contended 
that the British and French hospital ships carried 
ammunition, and even troops. This was not true, 
but it served as an excuse to persist in such in- 
human warfare. 

The German practice of firing on the Red Cross 
flag was not confined to hospital ships. All 
through the war the Germans violated the rules of 
civilized warfare by dropping bombs on hospitals, 
by utilizing ambulances for bringing up ammuni- 
tion, even by carrying machine guns hidden in 
stretchers, knowing that the stretcher-bearers 
would not be fired upon. It became clear that 
Germany intended to win the war at any cost. 
Honor, as understood among self-respecting peo- 
ples, she apparently had no use for. During the 
Belgian invasion it was a frequent practice to 
drive Belgian peasants — women and children — in 
front of German regiments while making an attack, 
it being known that their countrymen would not 
fire upon them. Over and over, during the war, 
German soldiers would hold up their hands and 
pretend to surrender, only to step aside when their 



132 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

unsuspecting enemies came up, disclosing machine 
guns which at once opened fire upon them. 

In German and Austrian prison camps many 
brutalities were practised. The English were the 
especial objects of German hatred, and were 
treated with the utmost severity. Half starved, 
they were forced to do the hardest kind of labor, 
and were kicked and beaten and tortured at the 
least sign of insubordination. Mr. Gerard, Amer- 
ican Ambassador to Germany before the United 
States entered the war, says that at one of the 
camps which he visited German children amused 
themselves by standing outside the wire fences 
about the enclosure and shooting arrows at the 
prisoners within. The horrors of these prison 
camps would fill many volumes. We can do no 
more than mention them here. But it affords the 
peoples of the Allied countries satisfaction to 
know that among the hundreds of thousands of 
prisoners taken by them during the war, there are 
no instances in which the enemy received any but 
the kindest and most humane treatment. 

Throughout the years 1915 and 1916, the under- 
ground work of the Germans in the United States 
went on. The burning or blowing up of munition 
factories assumed large proportions. Strikes 
were continually being fomented. Bombs placed 
aboard ships sailing for foreign ports caused 
many losses. At last the situation became so seri- 
ous that Dr. Dumba, the Austrian Ambassador, for 



OTHER EVENTS IN 1915 133 

attempting to bring about strikes, was obliged to 
leave the country. Not long after, the military 
and naval aides of the German Ambassador were 
also forced to leave, on account of their pernicious 
activities. The relations between Germany and 
the United States gradually became more strained, 
and far-seeing men began to believe that it was 
only a question of time before America would be 
obliged to enter the war. 

A phase of Turkish misrule in Asia Minor was 
brought to the attention of the world during this 
year. Among the peoples subject to the sultan 
were the Armenians, a peaceable race of Chris- 
tians, occupying a stretch of territory lying along 
the southern shore of the Black Sea. Scarcely 
had Turkey entered the war when, on the pretext 
that the Armenians were disloyal, she began sys- 
tematically to murder them. The aged and the 
men of military years were killed. The young 
women were sold into slavery. It is doubtful if 
there exists any record in history of a fouler crime 
than this slaughter of a Christian race by Ger- 
many's non-Christian allies. Germany possessed 
complete political and military control of the Turk- 
ish Government. She could have prevented these 
massacres had she seen fit to do so, but she coun- 
tenanced them. Indeed, German officers even as- 
sisted in the terrible work. In a short time many 
hundreds of thousands of these unfortunate peo- 
ple had perished, and before the war ended the 



134 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

victims numbered over a million. The world stood 
aghast at this spectacle of the people of a so-called 
Christian nation aiding a non-Christian race to 
murder by wholesale those of their own faith. 

The year 1915 came to a close upon a world filled 
with bitterness. Germany's might had won her 
great victories, and people everywhere began to 
fear that she would prove invincible. Her suc- 
cesses in Russia and Siberia, her unbroken western 
front, her challenge to Great Britain on the high 
seas through her submarines, her success in keep- 
ing America out of the war, all seemed to point to 
her ultimate triumph. Only the deep faith of the 
people of Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, and 
France enabled them to sustain the terrible losses, 
the bitter hardships, which fell to their lot. Rus- 
sia was sustained by no such ideals. Her soldiers 
fought bravely, but they fought at the command 
of an autocratic ruler, and their hearts were not 
in the war. Already there were ominous signs of 
the great revolution which was soon to sweep over 
that country. Meanwhile, on the western front, 
both Germany and England were preparing 
mighty blows, the one against the French fortress 
of Verdun, the other against the German lines 
along the river Somme. The story of these two 
colossal battles constitutes the military history of 
the year 1916 on the western front. 



CHAPTER XIV 

VERDUN AND THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE SOMME 

PERHAPS the greatest event in the history 
of the year 1916 was the Battle of Verdun. 
In its results it ranks with the Battle of the Marne. 
Had Verdun fallen, France would have fallen with 
it. Only the breasts of its heroic defenders stood 
against the concentrated might of Germany. For 
many months the flower of the German Army 
strove to batter down that blue-clad line ; but al- 
though it wavered, it never broke. Before this 
grim and ancient fortress on the river Meuse half 
a million of the kaiser's soldiers fell, and almost 
as many Frenchmen, but Verdun stood like a rock, 
and with it France. 

Looking at the map, one will see that the long 
battle-line crossing France from the west to the 
east ended at Verdun, where it turned south along 
the Meuse to Nancy, Belfort, and the borders of 
Switzerland. Just below Verdun a long triangu- 
lar section of German-held territory projected out 
from the German lines in a westerly direction 
across the Meuse, at St.-Mihiel, cutting the rail- 
road from Verdun south. This projection, called 
the St.-Mihiel salient, we have referred to before, 

135 



136 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

at the time of the first great German drive toward 
Paris in 1914. 

The great German general staff was now headed 
by General von Falkenhayn, who had replaced von 
Moltke after the Battle of the Marne. As the 
Marne failure served to destroy von Moltke 's 
military prestige, so that of von Falkenhayn was 
to find its grave before Verdun. 

Just why the Germans decided to attack Verdun 
is not definitely known. It was a point of great 
natural strength, and one which the French were 
obliged to defend to the utmost, since it formed 
the corner, or elbow, where their east and west 
and north and south lines met. Had it fallen, the 
front in both directions would have crumbled, and 
all of eastern France would have been open to. 
attack. Certainly the Germans expected to take 
it, or they would not have made the attempt. It 
is probable that General von Falkenhayn, chief of 
the general staff, and the crown-prince, who com- 
manded the armies before Verdun, were annoyed 
because von Hindenburg and von Mackensen were 
winning all the laurels of the war in the East, and 
they determined to show the German people that 
they could do the same thing on the western front. 
The crown-prince was ambitious to shine as a mili- 
tary leader, but up to now he had won no victories. 
Doubtless the kaiser thought that a great success 
at Verdun would bolster up the young prince's 
waning military reputation. 



VERDUN 137 

The weakest point in the defense of Verdun was 
its rail communications. One line ran westward 
to Paris, but too close to the front. The line run- 
ning south was, as we have said, cut by the west- 
ward sweep of the great St.-Mihiel salient. To 
bring up the enormous number of shells required 
in modern battles ample railroad facilities are 
needed. No doubt the German leaders took this 
weakness at Verdun into account. 

The attack, launched in February, 1916, was pre- 
ceded by the most tremendous artillery bombard- 
ment that the world had ever seen. All previous 
bombardments were as nothing to it. The Ger- 
mans had brought up heavy artillery in such quan- 
tities that the massed guns were almost wheel to 
wheel. Thousands of light and heavy cannon 
poured hundreds of tons of steel upon the French 
defenses. But the result was not the same as it 
had been at Antwerp, or Liege, and for this there 
was a very good reason. 

General Castelnau, in command of the French 
when the attack began, had learned the lesson 
which the fall of those great fortresses taught. 
He did not depend for defense upon the steel and 
concrete forts which surrounded Verdun, for he 
knew that the heavy German shells would soon 
render them useless. Instead, he had moved his 
own heavy guns to new positions, protected by 
thick embankments of earth, and he had also 
thrown line after line of trenches out beyond the 



138 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

fortifications, knowing, as we have said before, 
that in the new warfare the guns could no longer 
protect the infantry, but the infantry must protect 
the guns. 

The effect of the bombardment upon the French 
trenches was devastating but not decisive. When 
one position became untenable, the men holding it 
fell back to another. When this had gone on as 
far as safety permitted, the French made counter- 
attacks and retook some of the trenches they had 
lost. Thus the Battle of Verdun consisted of a 
vast number of small battles, which continued day 
after day and night after night for many months. 

The first German assaults, made with the utmost 
determination, resulted in considerable gains. 
The outlying French defenses to the north of 
the city on both sides of the river Meuse were cap- 
tured, and gains were also made on the east. The 
demand for reinforcements, for supplies of every 
sort, on the part of the defenders, was so great 
that the rail communication soon proved insuffi- 
cient. The French met the emergency with their 
usual skill. Motor-trucks of every sort, by the 
thousands, were hurried up and put into service. 
A continuous line of them filled the road coming 
up from the rear. Thousands of men, old soldiers 
unfit to enter the front lines, worked day and 
night keeping these roads in repair. Shells from 
the German heavy guns fell about them, great 
holes were blown in the roads, their surface was 



VERDUN 139 

ground to dust by the incessant traffic, but the line 
of trucks never stopped, the service never broke 
down. It was a splendid achievement. If the 
taxicabs of Paris saved that city at the Battle of 
the Marne, the motor-trucks of France saved Ver- 
dun. 

A new commander, General Petain (afterward 
commander-in-chief of all the French armies and 
Marshal of France), was placed in charge. Dur- 
ing the critical moments of the first German ad- 
vances it seemed as though the city must fall. 
Attack had followed attack, until the armies of the 
crown-prince had advanced over seven miles, and 
reached the last line of French defenses. Fort 
Douaumont, one of the inner ring of forts, had 
fallen; the Germans were in sight of the city. 

General Petain 's first move was to deliver a 
series of swift counter-attacks, which drove the 
Germans back some distance. To him is credited 
the solving of the supply problem by the use of the 
motor-trucks. He inspired his soldiers by giving 
them as a watchword the famous phrase, "They 
shall not pass." And although hundreds of thou- 
sands of Frenchmen fell, the Germans did not pass. 
After the twenty-sixth of February, when Petain 
organized his defense, the progress of the Ger- 
mans was much slower, and for every foot they 
gained they lost great numbers of men. About 
the hill of Le Mort Homme (Dead Man's Hill) and 
the heights adjoining it the struggle ebbed and 



140 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

flowed with almost unbelievable fury. Week after 
week these vital positions were fought over, chang- 
ing hands sometimes within a few hours, until the 
ground was plowed by shells into heaps of scorched 
and blackened dust, in which lay the broken bodies 
of thousands and tens of thousands of men. The 
world had always said that the French were bril- 
liant in attack, but lost heart when put on the 
defensive. The Battle of Verdun proved this to 
be an error. No troops in the world ever defended 
themselves with grimmer courage. After a battle 
which lasted nearly five months, and cost the Ger- 
mans half a million men, the attempt to advance 
farther was given up, and Verdun was saved. 

The Germans had other reasons than their re- 
peated failures for giving up the attack. A new 
battle had begun, on the British front to the west, 
now known as the First Battle of the Somme. On 
the first of July the English, under General (later 
Field-Marshal) Sir Douglas Haig, who had suc- 
ceeded General French as the British commander- 
in-chief, struck the German lines on a wide front 
north and south of the river Somme. 

The British had been preparing for this attack 
all through the winter and spring of 1916, collect- 
ing great stores of guns and ammunition, and 
bringing to the front their newly trained men. 
They experienced many delays in this work of 
preparation, and were not entirely ready to begin 
the battle at the time the attack was made. But 



VERDUN 141 

the news from Verdun made quick action neces- 
sary. In spite of the heroic defense of the French 
troops, there was still danger. They were worn 
out. There were rumors that the crown-prince 
was preparing another and greater attack. The 
British drive along the Somme put an end to all 
such plans. Germany was now herself placed on 
the defensive, and was obliged to hurry many men 
from the front at Verdun in order to meet the new 
attack farther west. 

The method adopted in 1916 to advance against 
fortified trench positions was to concentrate great 
quantities of artillery on a wide front, and then 
subject the opposing lines to a violent and long- 
continued bombardment. This was the method 
used by the Germans at Verdun, and had their 
attack taken place in more level country, it would 
probably have succeeded. Here along the Somme 
there was no rugged country, no great natural 
defenses, such as protected Verdun. The British 
believed that a "drum fire" bombardment with 
high-explosive shells, lasting for many days, would 
reduce the German trenches to ruins, and render 
their capture possible. The result was not all that 
they expected. The trenches with their wire en- 
tanglements were leveled, it is true, but the strong 
concrete forts, unless directly hit, were not in- 
jured, and the deep underground dugouts sheltered 
the Germans with their machine guns until the 
bombardment was over. Then they would come 



142 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

out, set up their machine guns behind broken walls, 
in shell-holes, or wherever else they could find shel- 
ter, and pour streams of bullets into the advancing 
enemy. 

In spite of these obstacles the British and 
French made steady progress, although their 
losses were very heavy. Throughout the summer 
and autumn of 1916 they drove the enemy back, 
from one position to another, until their progress 
began to cause the German leaders anxiety. If 
the English were losing heavily, the Germans were 
doing the same. Meanwhile, as a result of his 
failure before Verdun, General von Falkenhayn 
had been relieved from the command of the great 
general staff and von Hindenburg, fresh from his 
victories in Russia, took his place. 

Late in 1916 von Hindenburg made a novel and 
unexpected move. He knew that his armies were 
being slowly but steadily beaten in the Battle of 
the Somme, and that the British were ready to 
renew their drive with even grimmer determina- 
tion as soon as the weather would permit in the 
spring. He therefore decided to make a great 
strategic retreat. Back of his lines he had had 
constructed a system of deep and formidable 
trenches, known as the ' ' Hindenburg Line. ' ' This 
system of defenses was laid out by the most skil- 
ful engineers in Germany. Every natural obsta- 
cle, such as a hill, a river, a canal, was taken ad- 
vantage of, to render the line absolutely proof 



VERDUN 143 

against attack. Enormous concrete dugouts, shel- 
ters, machine-gun positions were built. Tunnels, 
often miles long, were dug underground, so that 
troops might pass quickly from one point in the 
line to another without being exposed to shell-fire. 
Acres of barbed wire, strung on steel posts, and 
twisted about in every direction, were put up be- 
fore the several lines of trenches. No effort, no 
cost was spared, to make this system of defenses 
the strongest in the world. All during the winter 
the Germans worked at it, and in March, 1917, 
when everything was ready, von Hindenburg 
swiftly withdrew his men from their advanced 
positions before the British lines to their new posi- 
tions in the rear. 

This, however, was not all that he did. When 
he drew back his armies to their new lines, he 
issued orders that the country over which they 
passed should be reduced to an absolute waste. 
The German troops carried out their orders to 
the letter. When they retired nothing was left. 
Every house, village, town was burnt or blown up. 
Roads were destroyed, bridges shattered, wells 
contaminated, trees of every sort, even the fruit 
trees in the French orchards, cut down; nothing 
was spared. When the German armies finally 
retired behind the Hindenburg Line the country 
before them for many miles was a desert. Von 
Hindenburg knew that it would require weeks, 
even months, for the French and British to con- 



144 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

struct roads, railways, bridges over this desolate 
waste. All their preparations for attacking his 
former lines were now rendered useless. Their 
huge stores of ammunition, their great guns, their 
miles and miles of light narrow-gage railroads, 
running everywhere behind the front to bring up 
ammunition and supplies, were all now of no 
value. Everything would have to be moved up, 
over a country almost impassable. By the time 
this could be done a large part of the spring and 
summer would be gone, and winter, with its early 
rains, would be at hand. It was a shrewd move, 
and one which enabled the Germans to prolong the 
war for many months. They knew, from their se- 
cret agents, that trouble was coming in Russia, and 
reasoned that if they could hold back the British 
and French during 1917, they could attack with 
greater forces later on. These forces they ex- 
pected to bring from the Russian front. 

The Hindenburg Line, they believed, could never 
be taken. To drive them out of France by the 
costly frontal attacks used by the British in the 
Battle of the Somme would, the Germans argued, 
require millions of men. Their experts said that 
before this could be accomplished the French and 
British armies would be exhausted. A new ele- 
ment, however, was entering the problem of trench 
warfare. 

This was a form of armored automobile, known 
as the "tank." The reason for this name is a 



VERDUN 145 

curious one. The British had earlier in the war 
imported from America a large number of heavy 
tractors — that is, traction engines driven by gaso- 
lene, and used to haul guns and other heavy loads 
up to the front. These American tractors were 
what are known as "caterpillar" tractors, so 
called because their driving-wheels, instead of rest- 
ing on the ground, ran on endless steel tracks or 
belts, so that these wheels were continually laying 
for themselves a broad track upon which they 
could pass over soft or rough ground, the track 
unrolling itself before the wheels, and being picked 
up after they had passed by the moving belt to 
which it was attached. 

The value of these tractors in passing over the 
rough and broken ground between the trenches 
was at once recognized by the British, and they 
arranged to use them as engines of war. Their 
plan was to cover the body of the tractors with 
heavy armor, which should be proof against ma- 
chine-gun fire, place machine guns inside them, 
and use them in attacking the enemy machine-gun 
positions or "nests" which had caused their ad- 
vancing forces such great losses. Two additional 
wheels in the form of a trailer were added, to en- 
able the machines to cross shell-holes and trenches, 
these trailers giving the tractors a much longer 
wheel base. 

The construction of a large number of these 
engines of war was begun, and in order to pre- 



146 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

serve the utmost secrecy they were referred to, in 
the official records of the British War Department, 
as "tanks." The name was merely a blind, to 
conceal what was being done, but when the ma- 
chines finally appeared on the battle-field, it clung 
to them, and they have been known as tanks ever 
since. They proved, before the end of the war, to 
be the final solution of the problem of successfully 
attacking trenches defended by machine-gun fire. 
When they first appeared on the front, at Cource- 
lette, in the autumn of 1916, the Germans were 
absolutely terrified. The lumbering monsters, 
weighing many tons — rolling irresistibly forward 
over shell-holes and trenches, crushing down wire 
entanglements, spitting a hail of bullets — caused 
them to drop their rifles and flee in disorder; 
Only a well-directed shot from a field gun could 
put a tank out of action, and such moving targets, 
in the smoke and dust of battle, were very hard 
to hit. 

Later on, both the French and the British built 
large numbers of these tanks. Some, of the heavy 
type, carried crews of six or eight men and were 
armed with small cannon for destroying opposing 
tanks or fortifications. Others, of a much lighter 
type, carried only two men, and were used along 
with infantry in attacking machine-gun positions, 
on account of their superior speed. These lighter 
tanks were known as "whippets." 

The influence of the tanks, during the final 



VERDUN 147 

stages of the war, can scarcely be overestimated. 
The Germans built a few of them, but they were 
heavy and clumsy in design, and accomplished 
little of value. It was inevitable that the tanks 
should be of greater service to the Allies, who 
were on the offensive, than to the Germans, who 
were on the defensive. They were the final an- 
swer to the German machine gun. 



CHAPTER XV 

SEA POWER AND THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND 

THE year 1916 witnessed a naval battle which, 
so far as the number and power of the ships 
engaged is concerned, was the greatest sea fight 
in history. Its results, however, were inconclu- 
sive ; that is, the situation which existed before the 
battle was not altered in any degree because of 
its having been fought. 

Before we take up the details of the battle itself, 
let us consider for a moment the question of sea 
power. 

England, as has been said before, possessed 
when the war broke out the most powerful navy in 
the world, as Germany possessed the strongest 
army. The British relied on their fleet to protect 
them from invasion, and also to protect their im- 
mense sea-going trade. 

Admiral Mahan, the great American naval stra- 
tegist, long ago laid down the theory that control 
of the sea would in the long run win the world's 
wars. The present conflict has proved the truth 
of his statement. England's blockade had never 
relaxed its grip from the day war began. Ger- 
many could get no copper for her shells, no cotton 
for her ammunition, no rubber for her automobile- 

148 



SEA POWER 149 

truck tires, no meats, no food-stuffs, no wool for 
uniforms or clothing, no leather for shoes. The 
whole nation began to suffer for want of these 
things. Before the war ended the people of Ger- 
many were wearing paper clothing and wooden 
shoes, using iron tires on their trucks, and taking 
from the inhabitants of invaded countries even 
their copper cooking-utensils, to be used in making 
shells. 

Yet all this terrific pressure upon the German 
nation was applied by a navy which had scarcely 
fired a shot. The British fleet was there — silent, 
watchful, always on guard — and the German mer- 
chant ships were rusting at anchor in their ports. 

Even the great German battle fleet, the second 
largest in the world, lay at anchor in the naval 
bases of the Kiel Canal, powerless. Splendid 
ships, splendidly equipped as they were, the Ger- 
mans knew that to attack the superior British fleet 
would result only in defeat. 

There were many persons in Germany, however, 
who thought that the German fleet might happen 
upon only a part of the British fleet, which part 
they might hope to defeat. Also there was much 
talk of what the German submarines would do, 
in a naval battle. Zeppelins, too, were mentioned, 
which would hover above the battle area and drop 
bombs upon the opposing ships. Laymen who 
urged these things as points in Germany's favor 
did not realize that the British ships were well 



150 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

equipped with anti-aircraft guns (that is, guns 
mounted so as to be able to fire vertically into the 
air) ; that to hit a moving vessel with a bomb from 
a height of a mile or more is an exceedingly diffi- 
cult operation ; that England had as many subma- 
rines as Germany, and might be expected to make 
use of them, although the slow speed of such ves- 
sels would render them of little value on either 
side in a naval engagement; and, above all, that 
the British fleet was too ably commanded to make 
it likely that any part of it could be caught nap- 
ping. 

In May, 1916, however, the entire German fleet 
left port, and engaged in battle with the British. 

Just why they did this is not known. The offi- 
cial German reports say that the fleet went out "on 
a mission to the north," but whatever that mission 
was, they did not accomplish it, since most of their 
vessels returned to port the following day. It is 
unlikely that they went out to meet the main Brit- 
ish fleet, for as soon as they did meet it they fled 
back to their bases. Some great and powerful 
vessels were lost on both sides, and the Germans 
claimed a victory; but it is now known that they 
suffered far more heavily than they admitted at 
the time the battle was fought, and the fact that 
they never ventured out again, but left the British 
in control of the North Sea, is sufficient proof that 
whatever victory there was did not lie on their 
side. Captain Persius, the German naval critic 



SEA POWER 151 

(writing in the Berlin "Tageblatt" after the close 
of the war), admitted that the German losses were 
vastly greater than the government had allowed 
to become known, and that the entire fleet was so 
crippled that it was unable to venture to sea for 
many months. Certainly the German losses were 
far heavier than was supposed at the time; yet 
they were not as heavy as they should have been, 
considering the immense superiority of the Brit- 
ish ; in fact, many naval experts feel that had the 
British commander, Admiral Jellicoe, shown 
greater initiative, greater dash, he might have cap- 
tured or destroyed the entire German fleet. 

Whether or not this is true will always be a 
matter of opinion. Admiral Jellicoe had upon his 
shoulders a vast responsibility. A single false 
move, an incautious advance into a mine-field, 
might have cost him many powerful vessels, pos- 
sibly endangered the whole Allied cause. He 
showed caution at a time when it would have been 
folly to take risks. His victory, as has been said, 
lay in the fact that the British control of the seas 
was not affected in any way by the outcome of the 
battle. 

The fight began early in the afternoon of May 
31, and continued throughout a large part of the 
night. A squadron of battle-cruisers, great ves- 
sels carrying guns as heavy as those on most 
battle-ships, of high speed but only moderately ar- 
mored, was proceeding eastward in the North Sea, 



152 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

under the command of Admiral Beatty, when 
smoke was observed on the eastern horizon, and 
one of Beatty 's scout-ships, far in advance, re- 
ported a squadron of German battle-cruisers going 
north. The British at once attacked, Admiral 
Beatty having six battle-cruisers under his com- 
mand, while Admiral von Hipper, the German 
commander, had only five. Von Hipper, as soon 
as the British came into view, turned south, prob- 
ably with the idea of luring his opponents into the 
midst of the main German battle fleet under Ad- 
miral von Scheer, which he knew was close behind 
him. 

When the Germans turned south, Beatty fol- 
lowed, the two fleets running along side by side at 
comparatively short range. To the consternation 
of the English, two of their finest and newest 
battle-cruisers, the Indefatigable and Queen Mary, 
were quickly sunk, although whether by gun-fire, 
mines, or torpedoes has never been ascertained. 
This left Beatty with only four cruisers to the 
Germans' five. British reinforcements, however, 
quickly came up, in the shape of four super-dread- 
noughts of the Queen Elizabeth class, mounting 
15-inch guns, under the command of Rear- Admiral 
Thomas. Thus the Germans were again outnum- 
bered. But soon there emerged from the haze to 
the south the entire German battle-ship fleet under 
von Scheer. Then the British ships turned to the 



SEA POWER 153 

north, not with the intention of escaping, as they 
remained within range, but hoping in their turn to 
lure the Germans northward toward the point 
where the British main battle-ship fleet under Ad- 
miral Jellicoe was located. Admiral Beatty had 
meanwhile sent messages by wireless to Jellicoe, 
telling him of the presence of the Germans, and 
the great British battle fleet, far stronger than 
the combined fleets of von Hipper and von Scheer, 
was hurrying southward at full speed. 

The Germans followed Beatty with his four 
cruisers and Thomas with his four battle-ships, 
and the two fleets kept up a running fight, with 
the odds greatly favoring the Germans. Beatty 's 
vessels being the faster, drew ahead, and presently 
he and Thomas were able to throw their ships 
across the front of the advancing German column. 
As a result, Admiral von Hipper 's flagship, the 
hutzow, which was in the lead, was put out of 
action, and the German Admiral transferred his 
flag to the next ship, the Moltke. The hutzow 
later sank. 

The first vessels of the oncoming British fleet to 
arrive were three older-type battle-cruisers under 
Admiral Hood. They at once entered the battle, 
but scarcely had they done so when Hood's flag- 
ship, the Invincible, burst into flames and sank. 
The concentrated fire of the whole German battle- 
ship fleet was now poured upon the four remain- 



154 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

ing super-dreadnoughts and the six remaining 
battle-cruisers under Thomas and Beatty. Ad- 
miral Hood had gone down with his ship. 

At this juncture the main British battle fleet 
under Admiral Jellicoe arrived on the scene of 
action, and once more the superiority lay with the 
British. By this time, however, it was growing 
dark, and the weather had become thick and hazy, 
making it difficult to tell friend from foe. The 
Germans, seeing that they were outnumbered, 
turned sharply to the west, while Jellicoe con- 
tinued south, hoping to get between the German 
fleet and its base, and thus cut it off and either 
capture or destroy it. 

Throughout the early part of the night there 
was furious fighting; many torpedoes were fired, 
and swarms of destroyers came into action. 
Three more cruisers — the Defense, the Black 
Prince, and the Warrior — were sunk on the Brit- 
ish side, but they were light vessels, thinly ar- 
mored, and of little value. On the German side 
a battle-ship, the Pommern, went down, together 
with the light cruisers Rostock, Elbing, Frauenlob, 
and Wiesbaden. The British and Germans each 
lost a number of torpedo-boat destroyers. These 
are the losses admitted on the two sides. The 
British statement was correct, that of the Germans 
was not. The men of the British fleet claimed to 
have seen three more battle-ships of the largest 
size and another battle-cruiser sunk, and Captain 



SEA POWER 155 

Persius, mentioned before, admitted that the losses 
of the Germans had for political reasons been 
hidden. The announcement given to the public 
the next day, however, made it appear that the 
British had lost twice the tonnage and three times 
the men that the Germans had lost, and the repu- 
tation of the English navy suffered greatly in the 
public mind. 

The most astounding feature of the battle, how- 
ever, was that during the night, short in these lati- 
tudes at this time of year, the German fleet was 
able to elude Admiral Jellicoe's vigilance, and re- 
turn to its base, in spite of the fact that the British 
vessels were between it and port. It is on this 
account that the English admiral has been criti- 
cized, but his reasons for not exposing his fleet to 
unknown dangers were doubtless those given 
earlier in this chapter. 

This great battle, which is called the Battle of 
Jutland because it was fought off the coast of the 
Danish peninsula of Jutland, at the extreme east- 
ern end of the North Sea, was the last naval 
engagement of any magnitude during the war. 
When the German fleet next came out of port, it 
was to surrender ignominiously to the war fleets 
of the Allies and America. 



CHAPTER XVI 

EUSSIA, AUSTRIA, AND ITALY IN 1916 

WE left the Russians, at the close of the year 
1915, standing at bay along their thousand- 
mile line from Riga to the Rumanian border. The 
Germans made many attempts during the winter 
and spring of 1916 to break through, especially at 
the city of Dvinsk, south of Riga, on the river 
Dvina, but all of these efforts failed. The Rus- 
sian armies had been supplied with arms and am- 
munition, their transport system had been im- 
proved, and they showed great activity all along 
the line. Early in June they began a formidable 
offensive on a front which gradually increased 
until it extended from the neighborhood of Pinsk, 
in the Pripet Marshes, southward to the Rumanian 
border. This was the portion of the eastern front 
held by the Austrians, and under the determined 
onslaughts of the newly organized Russian armies 
it slowly began to give way. 

The entire operation was under the command of 
General Brusiloff, one of the most brilliant of the 
Russian commanders, and his successes soon at- 
tracted world-wide attention. So rapid was the 
advance of the Russians along this great front of 

156 



RUSSIA, AUSTRIA, AND ITALY 157 

two hundred and fifty miles that "by June 13 they 
had captured one hundred and twenty thousand 
prisoners and vast quantities of artillery, ammuni- 
tion, and supplies. A day later the number of 
prisoners had been increased to one hundred and 
fifty thousand. By June 17 they had again cap- 
tured Czernowitz, the capital of Bukowina, the 
Austrian province lying just to the north of the 
frontiers of Rumania. Before July 1 the pris- 
oners alone lost by the Austrians amounted to 
nearly two hundred and twenty thousand, while 
their killed and wounded had reached huge fig- 
ures. During July the Russians continued to 
sweep ahead with even greater vigor, and soon had 
conquered the Province of Bukowina, once more 
reached the Carpathian Mountains, threatening 
the passes into Hungary, while an advance of over 
forty miles, further to the north, made the position 
of Lemberg perilous. This great drive by the 
Russians under General Brusiloff was one of the 
finest Allied successes during the war, and by it 
the Austrians lost in killed, wounded, and missing 
at least seven hundred and fifty thousand men. 
Their losses in prisoners alone totaled four hun- 
dred thousand, while the artillery, ammunition, 
and supplies which passed into the hands of the 
Russians reached vast figures. It is said that the 
great drive came to a halt because of lack of am- 
munition, the immense demands of modern battles 
having used up the reserve supplies accumulated 



158 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

by the Russians during the winter. Another rea- 
son may be found in the fact that Germany once 
more came to Austria's aid, by sending troops and 
munitions of war to the front in Galicia for the 
defense of Lemberg. There was much heavy 
fighting all along the eastern front during the 
remainder of the year, but the situation was not 
materially changed. 

Before Brusiloff 's drive Austria was for a time 
successful against Italy in the west. We have 
told how the Italians had undertaken to protect 
their left or northern flank, while attacking along 
the Isonzo, by carrying on a difficult campaign to 
secure the passes through the mountains leading 
into Austria. This campaign had made slow but 
continued progress, and the Austrian leaders de- 
termined to stop it. They therefore gathered a 
great force in the Trentino district, about Trent, 
and in the spring of 1916, as soon as the snow had 
thawed, descended like a thunderbolt upon the 
Italian armies. The attack was prepared by in- 
tense artillery fire, and at first was very success- 
ful. The Italians, taken by surprise, were driven 
from position after position in the mountains, won 
at great cost during the previous year, and by 
June the Austrian armies were almost through the 
mountainous country and ready to descend upon 
the Italian plains. Italy was in a panic. A little 
more success, and her armies along the Isonzo 
might be attacked in the flank, their lines of com- 



RUSSIA, AUSTRIA, AND ITALY 159 

munication cut, and all of northern Italy con- 
quered by the invaders. But just then the great 
Russian drive under General Brusiloff began in 
turn to render affairs critical for Austria. She 
was forced, just when success 'seemed within her 
grasp, to withdraw troops from the Italian front 
in order to save her armies in Bukowina and Ga- 
licia. At the same time the Italians counter-at- 
tacked and before long they were making steady 
progress back to the positions in the mountains 
from which they had so suddenly been thrown. 

A few weeks later, in August, the Italian armies 
along the Isonzo, which had so long attempted 
without success to capture the defenses of Gorizia, 
launched a new attack against that city. Monte 
San Michele, the key position, was stormed after 
a terrific bombardment, and taken, and Gorizia 
fell, with fifteen thousand prisoners and great 
quantities of stores of all sorts. It was the first 
real success which had crowned Italy's efforts 
since her entrance into the war, and her people 
were jubilant. The advance along the Carso, the 
rugged plateau leading southward toward Trieste, 
was continued with renewed vigor, and the outer 
defenses of the city were placed under bombard- 
ment by English monitors, mounting heavy guns, 
which had come into the Adriatic to assist in the 
attack. But the Austrians resisted bravely, and 
the close of the year found the Italians very little 
nearer Trieste than they had been in August. In 



160 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

another direction, however, they made more de- 
cided progress. The fall of Gorizia opened the 
way for an attack to the northeast, along the Bain- 
sizza Plateau, in the direction of Laibach. Only 
the rough country of the Julian Alps barred their 
way to an advance upon Vienna itself. The pros- 
pect of thus carrying the war into Austria was an 
alluring one, and later on, as the Italians pro- 
gressed, many of the Allied leaders urged that 
men and guns be sent to aid the Italians in such 
an undertaking. But other and most unexpected 
events, early in 1917, prevented this plan from 
being carried out. 



CHAPTER XVII 

RUMANIA AND THE NEAR EAST IN 1916 

ANEW country entered the ranks of the Allies 
in August, 1916. This country was Rumania, 
the most northerly of the Balkan states, situated 
for the most part north of the Danube River. As 
may be seen from the map, Rumania at this time 
was shaped something like the letter J, part of 
its territory extending north and south, the other 
part east and west. These two parts of the coun- 
try, like two great arms, nearly surrounded the 
Austrian province of Transylvania, but were cut 
off from it by the Carpathian Mountains. Ru- 
mania entered the war for reasons similar to those 
that brought Italy in ; she wished to bring under 
her rule large areas of Austria which were inhab- 
ited by Rumanians. This race is of Latin origin, 
Rumania having once been a Roman colony. The 
Rumanians differ greatly from the neighboring 
Magyars, or Slavs. However, as we have seen so 
often before in the course of the great war, it had 
made no difference to the autocratic rulers of Aus- 
tria that Transylvania rightly belonged to Ru- 
mania, that the inhabitants of Transylvania had 
the right to say by whom they should be governed. 
The boundary between Rumania and Austria was 

161 



162 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

fixed along the Carpathians because these moun- 
tains formed a military barrier; in other words, 
made the Austrian frontier safe. But the Ruma- 
nians in Transylvania sang their folk-songs and 
dreamed of freedom as so many other oppressed 
races were dreaming, all over Europe. ''Why," 
they said, "should we pay taxes to the Emperor 
of Austria, when we do not want his government 
and are not fairly represented in it?" It was the 
same question that caused our American fore- 
fathers to declare, "No taxation without repre- 
sentation," and free themselves from the rule of 
England. 

Rumania entered the war at this particular time 
because of the great success which had attended 
General Brusilofr's drive against the Austrians. 
As we have seen in a previous chapter, the Rus- 
sian armies from the Pripet Marshes to the Ru- 
manian border had swept far to the west, and now 
stood along the Carpathian Mountains at Ru- 
mania's frontier. They expected to advance 
through these mountains into southern Austria, 
and the Rumanians planned to link their armies 
up with the Russians, and advance with them. 
The Rumanian armies numbered about six hun- 
dred thousand men, with reserves of perhaps an 
equal number. Their assistance, it was expected, 
would add greatly to the strength of the Allied 
cause. From a military standpoint their decision 
to enter the war at this time was sound. 



RUMANIA AND THE NEAR EAST 163 

From a political standpoint, however, it was a 
tragedy, although the Rumanian leaders could not 
have been expected to know it. Rumania was 
sacrificed as a result of a wide-spread campaign 
of treachery which was going on in Russia. As 
has been pointed out before, Germany did not de- 
pend upon the might of her armies alone to gain 
her victories. Her secret agents were at work 
everywhere — in Italy, in France, in the United 
States, in Russia — trying by means of bribery, of 
corruption of every sort, to disorganize the power 
of her enemies. Her efforts in Russia were be- 
ginning to bear fruit. A new Russian premier 
was in office, Boris Sturmer, a man of German 
blood and sympathies. He induced Rumania to 
enter the war by promises of Russian assistance, 
which promises were never kept. When the Ru- 
manian armies advanced into Transylvania they 
expected the armies of Russia to advance with 
them, but the Russians did not move, and Rumania 
was left to carry on the fight alone. It is highly 
probable that the whole scheme originated in the 
office of the German general staff, whose power in 
Russian affairs was increasing daily, and was soon 
to plunge that unhappy country into a frightful 
revolution. 

The Rumanian plan of campaign was simple, 
and at first proved successful. The shape of the 
country, as has been pointed out, was such that 
by advancing through the Carpathians westward 



164 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

from her north-and-south frontier, and northward 
from her east-and-west frontier, she could enclose, 
as within two out-reaching arms, all that part of 
Transylvania lying between them. On August 27 
the Rumanian armies were on the move, and 
within four days had advanced far into Austrian 
territory and taken the strongly defended town of 
Orsova. The Allies were jubilant. 

One of the singular features of the Rumanian 
advance into Transylvania is the fact that she left 
her southern flank, which borders on Bulgaria, vir- 
tually undefended. It has been asserted that an 
agreement existed by which Bulgaria was not to 
attack her. If such an agreement was ever made, 
it was very soon broken, for on September 3 a 
powerful army of Bulgarians, Germans, and 
Turks, led by General von Mackensen, the con- 
queror of Galicia and Serbia, crossed the Ru- 
manian frontier and advanced into the Dobrudja. 
This part of Rumania is a long, narrow strip of 
territory lying south of the river Danube, and, as 
has previously been pointed out, was in part taken 
from Bulgaria by Rumania after the second Bal- 
kan War. Now Bulgaria saw her opportunity to 
get it back. 

Von Mackensen and his forces advanced at once 
toward the great Cernavoda Bridge across the 
Danube, the only bridge over the river east of Bel- 
grade, and soon was in possession of its southern 
end. Meanwhile, the Rumanians, advancing with 



RUMANIA AND THE NEAR EAST 165 

great success, reached Hermann stadt, and now 
controlled about a third of Transylvania. To pro- 
tect their southern flank, they sent forces of con- 
siderable size into the Dobrudja, and with some 
assistance from Russian troops succeeded in driv- 
ing von Mackensen back. The Allies at Saloniki, 
far to the south, had meanwhile started a spirited 
attack against the Bulgarians, and some of the 
Bulgarian troops with von Mackensen were sent 
south to assist in repelling it. 

But now a new factor was to come into the situa- 
tion. The Germans, who had been waiting for the 
opportune moment to crush Rumania, had been 
quietly sending forces to the assistance of the Aus- 
trians. In fact, the rapid Austrian retreat was 
part of their plan. A powerful army was assem- 
bled north of Hermannstadt, under the command 
of General von Falkenhayn, the former chief of 
the German general staff, whose failure at Verdun, 
as we have seen, had cost him his position. Once 
this army began operations, the fate of Rumania 
was sealed. On the twenty-sixth of September 
the Austro-German forces began to advance, and 
by the middle of October the Rumanians had lost 
virtually all the territory they had gained, and 
were back in the passes of the Carpathians through 
which they had advanced. Had Russia, at this 
time, sent an army to the west across the Carpa- 
thians into Hungary, they could have gotten be- 
hind von Falkenhayn 's forces, cut his communica- 



166 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

tions, and brought about a great German defeat. 
But the Russians did not move. 

Fighting in the Dobrudja had meanwhile become 
very severe, with successes on both sides. The 
Rumanians had blown up the great bridge over the 
Danube, and it seemed impossible for von Macken- 
sen to cross. At this point the Danube is very 
wide. The Rumanians hoped to prevent a cross- 
ing, but the German strategy soon dashed their 
hopes. Von Falkenhayn, who had broken through 
the mountain passes in western Rumania, made a 
rapid advance southward across the east and west 
leg of that country, reached the north shore of the 
Danube, drove the Rumanian forces eastward, and 
effected a junction with the armies of von Macken- 
sen on the other side of the river. 

From this point on the Rumanian case was hope- 
less. The two powerful Teutonic armies swept 
eastward and on the sixth of December entered 
Bucharest, the Rumanian capital. The remainder 
of the Rumanian armies retreated into the north- 
eastern part of the country, the capital was moved 
to Jassy, near the Russian frontier, and the Ger- 
man advance was stopped along the line of the 
river Sereth. In the few months that Rumania 
had been in the war she had lost two thirds of her 
territory, including her capital, two hundred thou- 
sand prisoners, and a great number of killed and 
wounded. What was most important of all, she 
had provided the Teutonic allies with vast new 



RUMANIA AND THE NEAR EAST 167 

territories from which to draw supplies of wheat, 
oil, and many other commodities sorely needed in 
Germany, and also given them absolute control of 
navigation on the river Danube. Rumania's fate 
was tragic. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

OTHER EVENTS DURING 1916 

IN January, 1916, as a result of the great Aus- 
tro-German drive through Serbia, another of 
the Balkan states succumbed to the power of Ger- 
many. This was Montenegro, which in spite of a 
brave but hopeless fight was soon overrun by Aus- 
trian forces. Her king fled to Italy. Thus, at 
the beginning of this year, the only foothold which 
the Allies still retained in the Balkans was the 
small area of territory around Saloniki, and the 
sympathy of a part of the people of Greece. Only 
the presence of Allied war-ships before Athens, 
and the threat of cutting off the importation of 
food, kept King Constantine and his German wife 
from throwing Greece into the war on the German 
side. 

In the same month England abandoned the vol- 
unteer system of recruiting and adopted compul- 
sory service. This action was not taken because 
the English had failed to support their country. 
Five million men had volunteered, but a portion 
had held back, and so great was the need for more 
men that it was determined to " round up" the 
slackers. 

168 



OTHER EVENTS DURING 1916 169 

A little later Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, head 
of the Pan-German party, was forced to resign, 
owing to the failure of his submarine campaign 
to starve England into submission. The British 
Navy had been fairly successful in combating the 
under-sea boats. Small craft of every descrip- 
tion swarmed in the waters about the British 
Isles. Huge nets were sunk, extending for many 
miles across the routes usually traveled by the 
German U-boats. Floats on the surface showed 
when a submarine had become entangled in these 
nets, whereupon the destroyers on watch dropped 
depth-bombs, so constructed as to explode when 
they reached a certain depth. In this and other 
ways many submarines were destroyed. Figures 
at the close of the war showed that out of three 
hundred and sixty submarines, Germany lost over 
two hundred as a result of the activities of the 
Allied navies. Von Tirpitz 's place was taken by 
Admiral von Capelle, and almost at once, in the 
month of April, a cross-channel passenger boat, 
the Sussex, was torpedoed, with considerable loss 
of life. There were Americans aboard, some of 
whom were injured. 

The attack upon the Sussex resulted in immedi- 
ate diplomatic protests by the United States Gov- 
ernment. Germany, as usual, attempted to quib- 
ble. First she said that the vessel had struck a 
mine. When fragments of a torpedo were found 
aboard, she asserted that the submarine com- 



170 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

mander had mistaken the vessel for a war-ship, a 
claim absurd on its face. Finally, when informed 
by the United States that if another passenger or 
freight vessel were sunk without warning the gov- 
ernment would at once break off diplomatic rela- 
tions, Germany admitted that she had broken her 
previous promises, but once more promised to 
carry on her submarine warfare in a humane and 
civilized manner. She reserved, however, the 
right to break this promise when it suited her pur- 
poses to do so. Meanwhile, the construction of a 
great fleet of large ocean-going submarines was 
being pushed by Admiral von Capelle. Germany 
was merely playing with the United States in 
order to gain time to complete these ships. 

During the early part of this year, Russia, in 
spite of her long-drawn battle-front at home, be- 
gan a campaign in a new area. A glance at the 
map will show that the Russian frontier between 
the Black and Caspian seas crosses a narrow neck 
of land close to the Caucasus Mountains. To the 
west of these mountains, along the southern shores 
of the Black Sea, lies Armenia, the scene of the 
terrible massacres of which we have already 
spoken. A large Russian force, under the com- 
mand of the Grand-Duke Nicholas, who had been 
deprived of his command of the Russian armies 
after the retreat from Warsaw in 1915, advanced 
through the Caucasus Mountains in February, 
1916, and moved westward along the Black Sea 



OTHER EVENTS DURING 1916 171 

toward the powerful Turkish fortress of Erzerum. 
The country is rough and mountainous, and almost 
without railroad facilities, but the grand-duke, 
one of the most brilliant of the Russian leaders, 
attained a great success. Within a few weeks he 
laid siege to Erzerum, and captured it in five days. 
This astonishing result may be appreciated when 
it is realized that the city was protected by eight- 
een powerful forts, mounting over a thousand 
guns, many of them of the latest Krupp pattern. 
The Turks lost close to twenty thousand prisoners, 
and the Russian forces swept rapidly along the 
shores of the Black Sea toward Trebizond. Here, 
however, the Turks made a strong stand, and pre- 
vented any further Russian advance. 

Toward the southwest, also, the armies of the 
grand-duke made rapid advances, forces of con- 
siderable size being sent into northern Persia. As 
the map will show, the direction of these advances 
was toward the Tigris River and Bagdad, against 
which the British-Indian forces were also moving 
northward, up the river from Basra. We have 
referred in a previous chapter to this advance in 
Mesopotamia. 

Had the British advance succeeded, there is no 
doubt that British forces would have been able to 
effect a junction with the Russians, and probably 
have driven the Turks out of both Mesopotamia 
and Armenia. But the British suffered a severe 
reverse. General Townshend, driving the Turks 



172 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

before him, had worked his way, after the severest 
kind of fighting, to the town of Kut-el-Amara, 
situated on the Tigris not far south of Bagdad. 
Capturing this place, he advanced to Cetisphon, 
only eighteen miles below the city. Here the Brit- 
ish were defeated, owing, it is said, to lack of a 
supply of water. The more probable reason is 
that the Turkish forces greatly outnumbered them. 
General Townshend, retreating to Kut-el-Amara, 
was surrounded there, and the Turks laid siege to 
the place. The siege began early in December, 
1915, and lasted for many months. 

The British sent new forces up the Tigris under 
command of General Aylmer. They reached the 
vicinity of Kut-el-Amara, after hard fighting, 
early in March, 191 6, but although only seven miles 
from General Townshend 's position, were unable 
to relieve him. Until the end of April desperate 
attempts were made to reach the now starving 
English forces bottled up in Kut, but all failed, 
and the coming of the hot and rainy season soon 
put an end to operations. On the twenty-ninth of 
April General Townshend surrendered with nine 
thousand men. Many had died from fever, star- 
vation, or the constant bombardment of the Turks. 
This defeat, small in a material way, greatly dam- 
aged the military reputation of the British among 
the native population of the country. 

The advance of the Russians through northern 
Persia had meanwhile progressed through Hama- 



OTHER EVENTS DURING 1916 173 

dan to Kermanskah, not much over a hundred 
miles from Bagdad. Some Cossack cavalry man- 
aged to get through the mountain passes and estab- 
lished communications with the British forces on 
the Tigris, but their number was too small to have 
any military significance, and the project of link- 
ing up the British and Russian forces in Mesopo- 
tamia was for the time being abandoned. 

In France the close of the year 1916 saw some 
brilliant work on the part of the French under 
General Petain at Verdun. In a series of sharp 
advances they retook, between October and De- 
cember, nearly all the ground they had lost to the 
armies of the German crown-prince earlier in the 
year. Their losses were very small, and they cap- 
tured many prisoners. These attacks by General 
Petain threw the Germans once more back to the 
positions from which they had made their first 
attack, and placed Verdun out of all danger. 

In another part of the world the Allies were 
gaining successes of great importance. In Africa 
Germany had lost the Cameroons to combined 
French and British forces; German Southwest 
Africa had surrendered to British South African 
forces under General Botha, who had fought 
against England in the Boer War; while German 
East Africa was almost entirely in Allied hands. 
The great colonial empire of Germany had dis- 
appeared. 

In November, 1916, the Emperor of Austria, 



174 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Francis Joseph, died, but his death had no effect 
upon the situation. His successor, the Emperor 
Karl, young and weak, was entirely under the 
domination of the kaiser and the military party 
in Germany, and it appeared to outside observers 
that after the death of the aged emperor Austria 
was more completely under the control of Ger- 
many than before. 

The closing days of the year 1916 found Ger- 
many if anything more powerful, more confident 
of victory, than she had been at any time since 
the beginning of the war. This confidence was 
based not alone upon her conquests in Russia and 
the Balkan States, but upon a sure knowledge of 
what was soon to happen in the empire of the czar. 



CHAPTER XIX 

UNCIVILIZED WARFAEE 

THE horrors which had characterized the car- 
rying on of the war during 1914 and 1915 
were increased in the year 1916. Not only did the 
Armenian massacres continue, but the air raids 
over London and Paris, and particularly over the 
former city, began to assume serious proportions. 
Night after night giant Zeppelins or the swifter 
airplanes flew over the city, dropping bombs and 
killing many hundreds of persons. The English, 
however, grimly set their teeth and determined to 
"carry on." The sinking of hospital ships con- 
tinued, and the cruelties visited upon the crews of 
torpedoed merchant vessels became more atro- 
cious. In more than one case submarine com- 
manders ordered the victims to leave their boats 
and assemble on the U-boat 's deck, and then, after 
having rendered the life-boats useless, submerged, 
leaving the unfortunates on deck struggling in the 
sea. Of the crew of the Belgian Prince but two 
survived to tell the tale. Rafts and boats contain- 
ing the survivors of torpedoed ships were run 
down and sunk without the slightest reason, and 
the losses to non-combatant seamen soon ran into 
the thousands. 

175 



176 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

It was not upon human beings alone that the 
Germans proceeded to vent their wrath. Works 
of art throughout Belgium and northern France 
were destroyed with a ruthlessness worthy of the 
ancient Huns, and it was not without reason that 
the civilized world came to look upon the Germans 
as a race of savages. 

Perhaps the most notable case of this kind was 
the destruction of the Cathedral at Rheims. In 
this famous old Gothic structure the kings of 
France had long been crowned. Here Joan of 
Arc brought the Dauphin Charles to his corona- 
tion, and throughout the world the building was 
looked upon with reverence as a splendid example 
of early Gothic art. 

The Germans, whose lines were for a long time 
located but a short distance to the north of Rheims, 
contended that the French were employing the 
towers of the cathedral as an artillery observation 
post, and while this was repeatedly shown to be 
untrue, the Germans used it as an excuse for sub- 
jecting the city of Rheims, and particularly the 
cathedral, to an almost daily bombardment. As 
a result the structure was terribly damaged. The 
wonderful stained-glass windows, created by art- 
ists of the Middle Ages, were shattered ; the price- 
less carvings and statues with which the building 
was ornamented were destroyed; the great vaulted 
roof of the nave was burned and wrecked, and at 
the close of the war the entire structure was little 




© Underwood & Underwood 

GERMAN SHELL 



BURSTING UPON THE CATHEDRAL AT RHEIMS 



This was early in the war; the building was later on almost completely destroyed 



UNCIVILIZED WARFARE 177 

more than a hopeless ruin. No military excuse 
can ever relieve the Germans of responsibility for 
this crowning act of vandalism. Apparently they 
gloried in the destruction of great works of art. 
Field-Marshal von Hindenburg declared on one oc- 
casion that all the works of art in the world were 
not worth the life of a single German soldier. 

Two great crimes against humanity stand out 
from among the bloody deeds by which the Ger- 
mans were disgracing their name as a civilized 
nation. They are mentioned not because they 
were any more atrocious than hundreds of others 
but because they attracted such wide-spread atten- 
tion. 

The first of these was the execution of Edith 
Cavell, an English nurse, in October, 1915. Miss 
Cavell practised her profession in the hospitals of 
Brussels, nursing Belgians, Germans, or patients 
of any other nationality with the same tender care. 
She felt deep sympathy for the suffering people of 
Belgium, and foolishly allowed her sympathies to 
cause her to assist certain Belgian refugees to es- 
cape across the frontier into Holland. Germany 
had forbidden any one to leave Belgium, and Miss 
Cavell was guilty of assisting in the breaking of 
this regulation. She was certainly not guilty of 
anything sufficiently serious to warrant her death ; 
yet the Germans tried and condemned her for 
espionage, and in spite of the efforts made by 
Brand Whitlock, the American Minister to Bel- 



178 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

gium, and by others, all mercy was denied her 
and she was shot as a common spy. It is even said 
that the volley fired by the soldiers who were de- 
tailed to execute her did not cause her death, and 
that she was finally killed by a pistol in the hands 
of a German officer. This brutal and senseless 
murder of a woman who, whatever her faults may 
have been, had acted from motives of humanity, 
and was in no way deserving of death, caused a 
thrill of horror to sweep over the civilized world. 
A second official murder, no less atrocious, was 
the shooting of Captain Fryatt, a British sea cap- 
tain, at Bruges, in July, 1916. The reasons for 
Captain Fryatt 's execution were these: The 
German Government, filled with some strange no- 
tion that a merchant ship which resisted a sub- 
marine was acting illegally, since it was not a 
ship of war, gave notice of its intention to treat 
the masters of such ships as criminals, who would 
be dealt with as non-combatants on land are dealt 
with in case they fire on armed forces. It is true 
that a citizen not in uniform who fires on enemy 
troops may in certain circumstances be shot for so 
doing, but it was preposterous for Germany to ap- 
ply this rule to the captain of a steamship who 
might resist being torpedoed by a submarine, not 
only because the submarine was itself acting il- 
legally in torpedoing the vessel without first re- 
moving to a place of safety its passengers and 
crew, but also because it was the duty of the cap- 



UNCIVILIZED WARFARE 179 

tain of such a vessel to do all in his power to save 
the lives of those aboard his ship. The whole 
affair was merely another attempt on Germany's 
part to frighten the world, but the hardy sea cap- 
tains of Great Britain were not to be intimidated 
by any such means, and refused to stand calmly 
by while German U-boats sank their ships and 
drowned or murdered their crews. Having no 
other means of defense, they tried to ram and sink 
the attacking submarines whenever possible. 
This Captain Fryatt had attempted on one occa- 
sion, with the result that he escaped with his ves- 
sel, but the Germans then and there marked him 
for death. Not long afterward his ship, the Brus- 
sels, leaving Rotterdam, was captured by German 
destroyers and taken to Zeebrugge, on the coast 
of Belgium, under an armed guard. Captain Fry- 
att was given a mock trial, in which he had no op- 
portunity to defend himself, and was then placed 
before a firing-squad and shot. 

When we remember that from the very begin- 
ning of the war the Germans had been guilty of 
the most unbelievable cruelties, that they had 
openly and repeatedly violated every rule of civ- 
ilized warfare, this murder of a peaceful English 
sailor for trying to save the lives of those entrusted 
to his care will always stand out as one of the most 
amazing pieces of hypocrisy of which even the 
hypocritical government of Germany was guilty. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 

THE two great outstanding events of the year 
1917 were the collapse of Russia and the 
entry of the United States of America into the 
war. These two occurrences, while radically dif- 
ferent in their nature, had behind them the same 
cause: each represented an attack upon autoc- 
racy, a movement toward the preservation of the 
liberty, the democracy of the world. 

In Russia the movement was directed against 
forces within — the czar and the corrupt imperial 
and military court which surrounded him. In 
America the movement was against autocracy 
without — the autocracy of the kaiser and his party, 
which sought to enslave the world. 

Whatever may have been the motives which ac- 
tuated the rulers of the nations of Europe when 
the war broke out in 1914, it had become clear to 
people everywhere, by the beginning of the year 
1917, that the great war was something more 
than a mere fight between Germany and England 
to control the trade of the world. It began to 
develop slowly, yet with ever-increasing force, that 
this huge conflict was in reality a revolution, that 
a world movement for the liberty of the people was 
in progress, similar in some respects to the 

180 



THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 181 

French Revolution. It was as though the latter, 
checked for a hundred years after the downfall 
of Napoleon by the manipulations of the crowned 
heads of Europe at the Peace of Vienna, had once 
more broken out, with every prospect of spread- 
ing to the ends of the earth. The bomb which 
killed an Austrian archduke in 1914 awoke not 
only the people of Serbia to resistance against 
their enslavement by the autocratic rulers of Aus- 
tria, but also the public in many other parts of 
the world, whose resentment against oppression, 
whose desire for self-government began to take 
form, to seek expression. 

In Poland, torn into three parts and held under 
Russian, German, and Austrian rule ; in 'Lithuania ; 
in Finland; in Bohemia and the other alien prov- 
inces of Austria-Hungary; in the Armenian and 
Arabian provinces of Turkey; in Russia; even in 
Germany itself, people began to Say to one an- 
other: "What use have we for these puppet kings 
and emperors, with their ridiculous claims to di- 
vine right to rule us, their pretenses to alliance 
with God? That sort of thing may have been well 
enough in the dark ages, when the people were so 
ignorant that they knew only enough to till the 
soil, or fight for some king or ruler when they were 
commanded to do so. But in the twentieth cen- 
tury such ideas are absurd, mere relics of feudal- 
ism, of the period when the common people were 
regarded as so many cattle, to be used as beasts 



182 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

of burden in times of peace, or as cannon fodder 
in times of war, in order that these self-elected 
rulers might live in luxury and idleness. "We 
claim the right to elect our own rulers; to make 
them responsible to us for their acts; in other 
words, to rule ourselves. All this talk of a divine 
right to rule us, of an alliance with God, is only 
a sham, to make us believe that it is our religious 
duty to submit, to do as we are told, so as to 
make ruling that much easier for those who have 
placed themselves in power over us. They know 
that the people are in their hearts religious, and 
they are using that fact to take advantage of us. 
We refuse to submit to it any longer." 

In England all such pretensions on the part 
of the king had long since been swept away. The 
barons of England when they forced King John to 
sign the Magna Charta, Cromwell when he fought 
the power of Charles I, had established the right 
of the people to rule, in England, just as Wash- 
ington established it in America and the leaders of 
the French Revolution established it in France. 
Great Britain, it is true, exercised authority over 
vast populations in Egypt, in India; but her rule 
was a beneficent one, bringing justice and law to 
races not yet sufficiently educated to govern them- 
selves. The United States governed under simi- 
lar conditions in the Philippines, giving freedom 
and prosperity to a race which under the auto- 
cratic rule of Spain had known only wretchedness, 



THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 183 

ignorance, and slavery. Only in Ireland, with 
rankling memories of past oppression, was there 
any great dissatisfaction with English rule; yet 
in Ireland the people not only had the same demo- 
cratic government that Scotland and Wales en- 
joyed, but had even been offered a separate or 
home government of their own. In Italy, as in 
Belgium, a democratic king ruled under the con- 
stitutional authority of a parliament elected by 
the people. But in Russia, as in Germany and 
Austria-Hungary, the ruler had the sole power to 
declare war, and the people had virtually no voice 
in the government. 

The Germans, when the Allied nations declared 
that they were fighting for the liberties of the 
people, laughed with scorn, and pointed to Russia, 
one of the most autocratic governments in the 
world. To this the Allies could make no reply, 
until the year 1917, and then, curiously enough, 
the autocratic rule of the czar was overthrown 
largely because of efforts made by Germany her- 
self. 

We have seen in a previous chapter that the 
German Government, through its efficient and 
wide-spread system of agents and spies, had for 
a long time been trying to corrupt the Russian 
military leaders, so as to render the Russian Army 
an easy victim to her own. At the same time tre- 
mendous efforts were made to spread dissatisfac- 
tion among the Russian soldiers and people by 



184 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

preaching revolt to them, and inciting them against 
the rule of the czar. The German politicians did 
not in the least desire to see Russia become a re- 
public. They had no real sympathy with the revo- 
lutionary party opposed to the czar, but they 
thought that if they could overthrow the existing 
government Russia would lie before them, a vast 
and ungoverned country, huge yet helpless, which 
they might seize and make use of to further their 
own interests. Russia's grain, oil, metals, cattle 
would all be theirs for the taking, and the great 
general staff dreamed of new armies, made up of 
millions of Russians, with which, under the iron 
rule of Prussian officers, they might yet conquer 
the world. Already German scheming had 
brought about the defeat of Rumania. During the 
winter of 1917 many thinking persons began to 
fear that Germany might gain by trickery and 
fraud the victory which she had so far failed to 
gain by force of arms. 

But a stronger force was at work than any which 
the Germans understood — the demand of a great 
people for freedom. For many years there had 
existed throughout Russia a revolutionary party, 
animated by a desire for liberty, but opposing to 
the violent and cruel methods of the governmen- 
tal police, methods of retaliation equally violent 
and cruel. These anarchists called themselves 
"Reds," since the color red has for a long time 
been associated with those who aim to secure lib- 



THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 185 

erty by the indiscriminate shedding of blood. 
These Reds did not desire to fight Germany; in 
fact, they felt no sympathy with either side in the 
war, contending that it was brought about and 
carried on by ruling classes to which they were 
opposed. Ignorantly confusing liberty with li- 
cense, foolishly believing that instead of absolute 
and autocratic rule they should have no rule, no 
government whatever, they were quite as ready 
to use the bomb against the better classes in Ger- 
many as they were to use it against those of their 
own country. Thus Germany loosed forces which 
before long were to get beyond her control. In 
Biblical language, she was sowing the wind, and 
was soon to reap the whirlwind. 

When a downtrodden people, especially a mor- 
bid and excitable people such as the Russians, 
turns against its rulers, the movement is certain 
to get beyond bounds. The same thing occurred 
when the people of France turned against the 
grinding rule of the Bourbons, and waded through 
rivers of blood before a real government by the 
people was established. Germany, fomenting re- 
volt in Russia, was like a child playing with fire. 
The conflagration she brought about was ulti- 
mately to consume the very foundations of her own 
autocracy. 

On March 9, 1917, the people of Russia rose 
against the czar, and from one end of the country 
to the other there sounded the terrible cry of an 



186 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

outraged populace demanding their freedom. 
Within three days the czar had abdicated and 
Russia had become a republic. Almost without 
premeditation the revolt was brought about. A 
mob in Petrograd, the capital of Russia, became 
unruly. Cossack soldiers were ordered to fire 
upon it, and refused. The Russian Duma, a 
congress of representatives of the people which 
the czar had reluctantly permitted to be organ- 
ized some years before, but which had no real 
power, took matters into its hands. A provis- 
ional government was established, under the lead- 
ership of Alexander Kerensky, and the world 
thought that a miracle nad been accomplished, that 
the people of Russia were about to enter upon a 
period of real constitutional rule. 

But this by no means suited Germany's pur- 
pose. The new government, formed not by the 
Reds but by thinking, conservative men, favored 
the Allied cause, and proposed to continue the 
war. As a result, the German agents at once be- 
gan to foment a new revolution, directed against 
the provisional government, for the purpose of 
bringing about a state of anarchy. Documents 
have since come to light, proving that this new 
revolution was organized and directed by the Ger- 
man great general staff. Two notorious anar- 
chists, Lenine and Trotzky, were sent into Russia 
under German pay, and soon succeeded in bring- 
ing about the new government's downfall. Ker- 



THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 187 

ensky fled, the Reds, who now called themselves 
"Bolsheviki," rose everywhere against all author- 
ity except that of Lenine and Trotzky, and mur- 
der, pillage, and arson became the order of the 
day. In the army all authority vanished. The 
men refused to obey their officers, even to salute 
them. Each man asserted that he was as good as 
his neighbor. Naturally, since the value of any 
armed force depends first upon discipline, the 
Russian Army soon became a helpless and disor- 
ganized mob. Germany had with a single stroke 
gotten rid of one of her most dangerous enemies. 

At almost the same moment, however, she had 
gained another and infinitely more dangerous one. 
It will be remembered that in March, 1916, the 
torpedoing of the cross-channel steamer Sussex 
had strained the relations between Germany and 
the United States almost to the breaking-point. 
Germany, however, had promised to sink no more 
ships without warning, reserving to herself the 
right to withdraw her promise later on, should cir- 
cumstances make it necessary. The circumstances 
she had in mind, but did not at the time explain, 
were merely the completion of her new fleet of 
ocean-going submarines, and the favorable turn of 
affairs in Russia. Now she was ready to throw 
off the mask, and defy the world. 

Very suddenly, on the thirty-first of January, 
1917, the German Government curtly announced 
that, beginning the following day, she would sink 



188 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

on sight any vessel whatever, belligerent or neu- 
tral, which might attempt to enter the waters sur- 
rounding the British Isles, France, Italy, and the 
eastern part of the Mediterranean. In other 
words, Germany ordered the seas closed to com- 
merce. She impudently suggested, however, that 
one American vessel a week, if painted with cer- 
tain stripes or markings so as to be readily identi- 
fied, might, by taking a narrow and prescribed 
course, be permitted to land at Falmouth, Eng- 
land, on Sundays, and leave on the following Wed- 
nesdays. This was the last straw. Not only had 
Germany repudiated her promises but she had 
treated the great American nation with contempt. 
A wave of indignation swept over the country at 
the mere suggestion that the right of American 
vessels to sail the high seas was henceforth to de- 
pend upon the will of the German Emperor, and 
only then, as people said, when " painted up like 
a zebra." 

Three days later, on February 3, the United 
States Government severed diplomatic relations 
with Germany, whose unscrupulous ambassador 
at Washington, Count von Bernstorff, was given 
his passports and ordered back to Berlin. Actual 
war had not yet come, but the public knew that it 
would be only a question of time before the United 
States would be forced to enter the conflict. Later 
in the month of February President Wilson ap- 
peared before Congress and asked for authority to 



THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 189 

arm merchant ships against attack by submarines. 
The United States proposed to defy the orders of 
the kaiser. 

The authority was promptly given, and the 
Navy Department at once began to mount guns up 
to six inches in size upon all ocean-going vessels 
bound for European ports. Two guns were usu- 
ally mounted, one forward, the other aft, and gun 
crews were provided by the navy. It was known 
that the large new German submarines carried 
6-inch guns, and guns of this caliber were installed 
on merchantmen wherever possible, but owing to 
the limited supply, and also to the fact that not all 
ships were strongly enough built to carry 6-inch 
guns upon their decks, many went out carrying 
lighter weapons. 

Frequent accounts of battles between armed 
merchantmen and submarines have been recorded, 
but in only a very few cases were the U-boats sunk. 
They presented a very small target, and when in 
danger had only to submerge. Nevertheless, mer- 
chantmen were much safer when armed. The 
submarines could carry only a limited number of 
torpedoes — from twelve to twenty, on the average, 
and these torpedoes cost many thousands of dol- 
lars apiece. Hence the U-boats, remaining away 
from their bases for weeks, were obliged to use 
their torpedoes with strict economy. Usually they 
sank ordinary cargo boats by shell-fire, reserving 
their torpedoes for big liners. But while it was 



190 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

one matter to come to the surface and shell an un- 
armed vessel, it was quite another to attack an 
armed one. Hence the number of sinkings among 
vessels that were armed was comparatively small. 
The arming of merchant ships, however, re- 
quired time, and during the first few months which 
followed the beginning by Germany of unrestricted 
submarine warfare, the losses, particularly among 
English ships, were enormous. Germany claimed 
that she would sink a million tons of shipping a 
month. She did not do this. If she had she 
might have won the war, because the available 
ocean-going tonnage of the world would at that 
rate soon have been exhausted, and neither food 
nor munitions of war could have been sent from 
America to feed and supply the Allied nations. 
But she did sink during the first three months 
of 1917 over a million and a half tons, and the 
Allies began to feel seriously alarmed. Already 
many of the finest of the Atlantic liners were at 
the bottom, and many more had been withdrawn 
from service for use as transports, hospital ships, 
and the like. Vessels were growing very scarce, 
and food in England equally so. Germany openly 
boasted that in six months England would be starv- 
ing, begging for peace. It was in Great Britain 
that the danger was most felt, for the British Isles 
had for a long time depended upon other countries 
for their supply of food. Virtually all of their 
wheat, and a large part of their meat, came from 



THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917 191 

the United States and the great overseas domin- 
ions of Canada and Australia. Now, with plenty 
of wheat in Australia, there were no vessels to 
carry it. 

As the danger of starvation increased, efforts 
were made in England to meet it. Great estates, 
long kept as private parks or game preserves, 
were plowed up and planted with potatoes or 
wheat, and since there were few men left at home 
to do farming work, the women went into the fields 
in great numbers, as they had already gone into 
the munition plants. The same thing took place 
in France, and in both countries the use of food 
was strictly limited. Many articles could be 
bought only in small quantities, and then the pur- 
chaser was obliged to present a card, allowing its 
holder so many ounces of bread, potatoes, meat, or 
butter each week. The same system had been in 
use in Germany for a long time. With the adop- 
tion of the food-card system England began to 
realize that she faced a serious crisis. The sit- 
uation of the Allied nations during the early 
months of 1917 was dangerous in the extreme. 
It remained for the United States to turn the 
scale in their favor. 



CHAPTER XXI 

AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 

THE United States of America was, in April, 
1917, the only great nation of the earth that 
had not been drawn into the world conflict, 
and its hour of destiny was at hand. Once diplo- 
matic relations had been severed, and merchant 
ships armed, war was inevitable. On April 6, as 
a result of certain astounding documents made 
public, by which Germany was shown to be engaged 
in a plot to turn both Mexico and Japan against 
America, Congress declared that between the Uni- 
ted States and Germany there existed a state of" 
war. 

The immediate causes of this action were un- 
important. The great underlying reason was a 
profound conviction on the part of the people of 
America that the principles of liberty as laid 
down in the Declaration of Independence were in 
danger. The American people saw that if the 
autocratic principles held by the kaiser and his 
party were allowed to dominate Europe, it would 
be only a short time before they would dominate 
America as well. If Germany did not hesitate 
to enslave such countries as Belgium, Serbia, 
Rumania, what reason was there to suppose that 
she would hesitate to do the same thing to the 

192 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 193 

United States? In every man's heart lay a fear 
that if the United States did not fight for freedom 
and democracy abroad, she would before long be 
obliged to fight for them at home. It seemed as 
though the war for independence fought by 1 Wash- 
ington and his men would have to be fought over 
again, if the world were to remain free. The Uni- 
ted States entered the war in support of a glorious 
cause. No nation ever entered a conflict in sup- 
port of a more glorious one. President Wilson, in 
some of his many memorable addresses, put the 
question very clearly when he said : 

"The world must be made safe for democracy." 

* # # 

"We are saying to all mankind we did not set 
this government up in order that we might have 
a selfish and separate liberty, for we are now ready 
to come to your assistance and fight out upon the 
fields of the world the cause of human liberty. In 
this thing America attains her full dignity and the 
full fruition of her great purpose." 

"There is, therefore, but one response possible 
from us : force, force to the utmost, force without 
stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force 
which shall make right the law of the world and 

cast every selfish dominion in the dust." 

# # * 

"To such a task we can dedicate our lives and 



194 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

our fortunes, everything that we are, and every- 
thing that we have, with the pride of those who 
know the day has come when America is privileged 
to spend blood and her might for the principles 
that gave her birth and happiness and the peace 

which she has treasured." 

* # # 

"We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities 
for ourselves, no material compensation for the 
sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of 
the champions of the rights of mankind. We 
shall be satisfied when those rights have been made 
as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations 
can make them." 

These inspiring words, delivered on various oc- 
casions, helped the people of the United States to 
understand clearly the reasons which made their 
participation in the great war inevitable. Young 
Americans of coming generations, reading them, 
and understanding the reasons which caused the 
people of the United States to pour out their blood 
so freely and unselfishly upon the battle-fields of 
France, will be finer and better men and women 
because of the knowledge that in the greatest crisis 
in the world's history the United States did not 
fail. 

The danger which had begun to threaten the 
Allied cause in the year 1917, did not arise from 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 195 

the possibility of starvation alone. Another and 
even graver danger menaced the liberty of the 
world, and it had its birth in the events which were 
taking place in Russia. 

We saw in the last chapter how the great Rus- 
sian Empire began to break up. The armies 
which had so long and valiantly held the front 
from Riga to the Rumanian border began to melt 
away. Committees of soldiers and sailors, called 
"Soviets," were formed to manage the affairs of 
the army and the navy. The German soldiers all 
along the battle-front were ordered to cross to the 
Russian trenches, carrying red flags, and to say to 
the Russian soldiers, ''Why should we fight any 
longer? We have no quarrel with each other." 
As a result, the Russian troops began to throw 
down their arms and go home. For them, the war 
was over. The plotters at Berlin smiled. The 
Russian pot was boiling entirely to their satisfac- 
tion. Soon Germany could safely begin the trans- 
fer of her armies from Russia to the battle-front 
in France. 

In the Allied capitals anxious statesmen watched 
the progress of events with alarm. Italy, fight- 
ing furiously along her northern and eastern fron- 
tiers, could not be expected to do more than hold 
the reinforced Austrian Army in check. This left 
only England, France, and the small remaining 
army of the Belgians to face the might of Ger- 
many, aided by troops from her Austrian, Turkish, 



196 THE BATTLE OP THE NATIONS 

and Bulgarian allies. It should be remembered 
that the population of Germany was almost -equal 
to the combined populations of England and 
France, while that of Austria was far greater than 
the population of Italy. Also, there were large 
French and British forces operating in Palestine, 
Macedonia, and Mesopotamia, against the Bul- 
garians and Turks. The war-worn soldiers of 
Great Britain and France on the western front 
in spite of their colonial troops would be outnum- 
bered, as soon as the German millions arrived 
from Russia. The situation looked dark indeed. 
But one thing could save it — the forces of America. 
Could these forces be organized, trained, equipped, 
and sent across three thousand miles of submarine- 
infested seas with apparently not enough ships to 
carry them? Could big guns, airplanes, rifles, ma- 
chine guns, shells, ammunition, trucks — all the 
huge and varied equipment of a modern army — 
be supplied in time to meet the German menace 
and save the world's civilization? It seemed an 
impossible task. The German leaders said it was 
impossible. The rest of the world feared it would 
prove so. Inspired articles appeared in the Ger- 
man papers, prepared by the general staff, which 
said that the United States had no army in the 
first place ; that if she had one it could never get 
to Europe, and that if it did get to Europe it would 
not fight. Such was the stupendous task which the 
United States faced. It will always remain to 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 197 

the glory of the nation that it met this task with 
superb courage, and accomplished it. 

The American Army, although splendidly 
trained and officered, was very small. The na- 
tion had one fighting arm, however, that was not 
only ready but equal to its task. This was the 
American Navy. Its chief lack was in destroyers, 
and steps to remedy this deficiency were taken as 
soon as war was declared. But those that the 
navy had were already on their way abroad. 
These swift boats were designed originally for 
the purpose of attacking the smaller and old- 
fashioned torpedo boats, but the experience of 
England and France had shown that they provided 
the best means of offense against submarines. 
When, after a stormy trip, this comparatively 
small squadron of American vessels arrived in 
English waters, the British admiral to whom they 
reported inquired how long it would be before they 
could undertake active service. The commander 
of the American squadron replied that they were 
"ready now." This was the spirit of the navy's 
officers and men. Within a few hours they were 
once more at sea, combing the surface of the 
waters, guarding incoming merchantmen, rescuing 
the survivors of torpedoed ships, ready to send to 
the bottom by means of their guns or depth bombs 
the first enemy submarine that might show its 
nose above the surface. Few in number, the 
American ships brought to the business of sub- 



198 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

marine-hunting a new spirit. It is no reflection 
upon the splendid officers and men of the British 
Navy to say that the Americans showed greater 
keenness and dash. Where an English destroyer 
would take a day or two to coal and re-fit after 
a cruise, the American boats were in and out again 
in a few hours. The Americans also brought into 
use, later on, improved apparatus for detecting the 
presence of submarines — delicate listening-devices 
which enabled those on board a destroyer to hear 
the beating of the submarine's propellers when 
she was near at hand. 

The United States will not, in a spirit of na- 
tional pride, claim too much for its naval forces 
abroad. They did their duty superbly, but they 
formed only a small part of all the Allied boats 
fighting the submarine menace. And yet the fact 
remains that within a week after their arrival in 
European waters the tremendous losses which the 
German U-boats had been inflicting upon Allied 
commerce began to decrease, and continued to 
decrease, as more destroyers crossed to the other 
side, until the end of the war. 

On June 8, 1917, a small body of United States 
staff officers, headed by Major-General John Per- 
shing, and accompanied by fifty privates and one 
hundred aviators, arrived in France. They were 
the advance guard of an army that grew and grew 
until it became a mighty host of over two million 
men. The Germans sneered, and said that two 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 199 

rooms and a bath had been reserved at one of the 
Paris hotels for the American Army. They had 
sneered once before, when they spoke of the Eng- 
lish Army as "contemptible," but they had seen 
that army grow until it numbered over five mil- 
lion men. Now, to their cost, they sneered again. 
America, however, said nothing, but went quietly 
ahead with the vast work of preparation. 

All through the dark days of 1917, while events 
in Europe were turning more and more to the ad- 
vantage of Germany, America worked as she had 
never worked before. The enrolling of volunteers 
for the army, the navy, the marine corps began at 
once, and the regiments of the national guard were 
called into service. Camps for training officers 
were established all over the country, and the best 
blood of the nation crowded to them, to give their 
services to the government. Huge cantonments 
for the assembling and training of a great army 
were hastily built at many points, and Congress, 
with scarcely a dissenting voice, passed a bill so 
startling in its nature that a few months before it 
would have caused something approaching a revo- 
lution. This bill called on the young men of the 
nation, from twenty-one years of age to thirty, 
to enroll for selective military service. This 
drafting of the nation's youth resulted in the reg- 
istration of nearly ten million men, from which 
to select America's first armies. Germany began 
to see that the United States was in deadly earnest, 



200 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

and redoubled her efforts to destroy Russia and 
get her men to France. 

The record of America's achievements in pre- 
paring for war would fill many volumes. No other 
nation in the world's history had ever undertaken 
so vast a task or completed it within so short a 
time. Not only did the huge training-camps, ac- 
commodating many thousands of men, spring up 
everywhere, but immense plants for the manufac- 
ture of new and improved types of machine guns, 
of light and heavy artillery, of gas-masks, rifles, 
cartridges, powder, uniforms, bombs, army trucks, 
tanks, airships and countless other articles needed 
in making war were constructed in record-breaking 
time. The railroads of the country were taken 
over by the government for war uses. A tremen- 
dous campaign of ship-building was begun, so that, 
no matter how many ships the German submarines 
might sink, there would be others leaving the ways 
to replace them. In a year, from building only a 
few ships each month, the United States was build- 
ing more than England, and had become the great- 
est ship-building nation in the world. Sums of 
money were appropriated for war purposes, so 
huge in amount that the few hundreds of millions 
spent to build the Panama Canal, which a decade 
before had staggered the nation, now seemed insig- 
nificant. A great campaign of food-saving was be- 
gun, nation-wide in its scope, whereby wheat, 
sugar, meat, and fats might be conserved for use 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 201 

by the Allies. The American people, always 
wasteful, suddenly began to economize as they had 
never economized before. Corn, barley, rice, rye 
were eaten in place of wheat. Fish, eggs, and 
poultry replaced meats. The use of grain for 
making spirits was stopped, and later on even the 
brewing of beer was prohibited. Women took the 
places of men in factories, shops, public convey- 
ances, on farms. For any one to be idle not only 
was considered a disgrace but in some of the 
states became unlawful. 

But the people of the nation responded cheer- 
fully and loyally to every sacrifice asked of them, 
and the great work of winning the war went on in 
ever-increasing volume. As by the breath of a 
new spirit the patriotism of the nation became 
unified. What France, England, and Belgium had 
endured year after year was suddenly brought 
home to the people of the United States. Their 
soldiers, their people, had held back the common 
enemy, had stood guard along the trenches of lib- 
erty, during the long dark hours of 1914, 1915, and 
1916. It was now the turn of the United States. 
All past differences were forgotten. Men of every 
walk in life, of every political and religious creed, 
of every race, gave their best efforts to support 
the program of the President and the nation. It 
was a superb exhibition of national unity, and it 
surprised the world. 

But it was not at home alone that the great 



202 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

work of preparation went forward. Across the 
water tasks equally great were being carried out. 
When it was determined to land millions of men, 
with their stores and equipment, in France, it 
was found that facilities were almost totally lack- 
ing. Everything would have to be prepared, be- 
fore the landing of troops in any number could 
even be begun. There were no adequate harbors, 
no docks at which men and supplies could be 
landed, no warehouses to hold the immense stores 
which would be needed, no railroads to carry these 
men and stores to the front. All had first to be 
built, and the men and materials with which to 
build them had first to be sent across three thou- 
sand miles of water, in constant danger of the Ger- 
man submarines. For the very first operation of 
deepening harbors, dredging-machines had to be 
sent. When dock-construction was started, piles 
from America were furnished with which to build 
them. Cement, steel, tools of every description, 
rails, locomotives, almost everything, came from 
across the water. 

It was a heart-breaking task, but the energy, en- 
thusiasm, and skill of the American engineers met 
it successfully. A few figures tell the story. The 
American Army sent to France nearly 1000 stan- 
dard-gage locomotives and 13,000 freight cars, 
and, in addition to operating them, had in service 
350 locomotives and 1000 cars of foreign make. 
Eight hundred and forty miles of standard-gage 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 203 

railroad were built, enough to reach from New 
York to Chicago. In addition, 200 miles of French 
railroads were operated by the Americans, 115 
miles of light railways were built, and 140 miles 
taken from the Germans were repaired and put 
in operation. Fifty-three thousand motor-vehi- 
cles were sent over for the use of the army. In the 
matter of harbors and docks, 10 steamer berths 
were built at Bordeaux, having a total length of 
4100 feet. At Brest, at St.-Nazaire, at La Pallice, 
and other points immense docks were constructed, 
some of them many thousands of feet long. Ware- 
houses lined the railroads for miles about these 
ports, their floor space reaching a total of almost 
23,000,000 square feet. When the war closed the 
American Army had on hand in France 390,000,000 
rations of beans, 183,000,000 rations of flour, 267,- 
000,000 rations of milk, 143,000,000 rations of 
sugar, 57,000,000 rations of coffee, 113,000,000 
rations of rice, and 89,000,000 rations of meat, the 
latter contained in huge cold-storage warehouses 
built for the purpose. Hospitals covering many 
acres, with hundreds of thousands of beds, were 
ready for the sick and wounded. As for the work 
undertaken by American engineers in rebuilding 
bridges, repairing highways, and the like, it would 
take many pages to make a list of what was done. 
It has been said that, had the Germans been able 
to take the channel ports in 1918, the facilities 
provided by the American Army on the west coast 



204 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

of France would have been ample to take care of 
the English armies as well. Reports of these ac- 
tivities, reaching neutral countries, caused a pro- 
found impression. Germany, it was felt, must 
win the war quickly or she could not hope to win 
it at all. The French engineers observed with as- 
tonishment and admiration the rapidity with 
which the great work of preparation went on. 
Labor-saving devices, new to them, were installed 
everywhere. Huge derricks and cranes lined the 
docks, by which the time of unloading the trans- 
ports, some of them of the largest tonnage, was 
cut down from many weeks or days to, in some 
cases, only forty-eight hours. Yet, with all this 
work under way, the daily food of the men em- 
ployed upon it was itself supplied from America. 
No added burdens were placed upon the long-suf- 
fering people of France. 

The problem of the shortage of ships was in 
part solved by the rapid handling of them. A 
vessel quickly unloaded, coaled, and sent back 
could made three trips where formerly it had made 
but two. And in part the problem was solved by 
putting into service all the German and Austrian 
vessels lying in American ports. The machinery 
of these vessels had been badly damaged by their 
crews, under orders from the German Govern- 
ment, and they were supposed to have been ren- 
dered useless for many months, if indeed they 
oould be repaired at all. Again the ingenuity of 



AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 205 

American engineers triumphed. The damaged 
engines and boilers were quickly repaired or re- 
placed, and the Germans were obliged to witness 
the humiliating spectacle of American soldiers 
crossing to Europe in some of Germany's finest 
vessels. 

Throughout all this period of intense effort and 
anxiety the people of the United States continued 
to do their part in helping to feed the suffering 
millions in Belgium, and also contributed liberally 
to relief work in Serbia, Poland, Armenia, and 
other lands devastated by the Germans and their 
allies. It is a fact worthy of record that even 
this relief work, which it might have been sup- 
posed the Germans would encourage, since it re- 
lieved them of serious obligations, was hampered 
in every possible way. Over and over relief- 
ships carrying food to Belgium, with the words 
"Belgian Relief" painted on their sides in letters 
ten feet high, were torpedoed and sunk. It seemed 
doubly clear that "Whom the gods would destroy 
they first make mad." Not only did Germany im- 
pede the feeding of the Belgians in this way, but 
she had for some time been carrying away into 
Germany, virtually as slaves, large numbers of 
the population of Belgium and northern France. 
These unfortunate men and women were dragged 
from their homes and their families and sent 
across the Rhine to labor in factories or on farms, 
under such rigid and cruel discipline that many 



206 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

never returned at all, while others came back to 
their native villages and towns broken in body and 
spirit. It need scarcely be said that such enslave- 
ment of non-combatants is contrary to interna- 
tional law. 



CHAPTER XXII 

MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 

IN our consideration of political events we have 
for the moment neglected the course of mili- 
tary operations during the year 1917. As a mat- 
ter of fact, these operations were not of great 
significance. 

The retirement of the German forces to the 
Hindenburg Line, of which we have spoken, made 
it impossible for the Allies to begin, without ex- 
tensive and long-continued preparation, an attack 
upon that portion of the line affected by the re- 
treat. But the northern end of the line, lying 
for the most part in Belgium, had not been so 
affected, and it was here that the British struck. 

To the north of Arras the German lines rested 
upon a stretch of high ground known as Vimy 
Ridge. Behind it lay a wide expanse of fairly 
level country, in which were situated the great 
coal-fields of northern France, centering about the 
city of Lens. The Germans were working the 
mines, and the supply of coal thus obtained was of 
material assistance in enabling them to carry on 
the war. They had fortified Vimy Ridge until 
they considered it impregnable, and the costly at- 
tacks made upon it in 1915 by the French had all 

207 



208 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

been failures. The British determined to take 
the ridge. 

The attack was made in part by Canadian troops 
and in part by troops from England. It was bril- 
liantly successful. The gallant Canadians, fam- 
ous along the entire front for their bravery and 
dash, swept over the summit of the ridge, taking 
many prisoners and guns, and held their gains 
against repeated counter-attacks. Early in April 
the Germans had been forced back to the outskirts 
of Lens, and it was even reported that the city had 
fallen, but this was not the case. The many slag- 
heaps about the place afforded admirable posi- 
tions for machine guns, and the Canadians paused 
at the outskirts of Lens in order to save their 
men. 

Another stretch of high ground, known as Mes- 
sines Ridge, formed a part of the German line 
opposite Ypres. Throughout the winter British 
miners had been driving tunnels under the Ger- 
man trenches and putting in position great quan- 
tities of high explosives. When all was ready 
these mines were exploded, and so terrific was 
their force that the entire top of the ridge was 
blown off. The German trenches were obliterated 
and their defenders killed, and the British occu- 
pied the ridge. 

These attacks formed part of a general plan 
worked out by Field-Marshal Haig, the British 
commander-in-chief, to drive the Germans from 




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MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 209 

the coast of Belgium, and thus deprive them of 
the ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend, used as bases 
for submarines. In the main the plan failed. 
The weather conditions were against the British. 
Incessant rains turned the battle-field into a mo- 
rass. Tanks were useless. Heavy guns could 
with difficulty be moved. After many weeks of 
the most desperate fighting the attempt to capture 
the Belgian coast was given up. The Germans 
claimed a victory, and in so far as they had de- 
feated the British purpose, their claim was jus- 
tified. The attacks further south, however, had 
greatly improved the British positions. The high 
ground formerly held by the Germans was now in 
the hands of their enemies. 

The French, in April, also undertook a great 
attack against the German lines along the Aisne. 
General Nivelle had been made the commander-in- 
chief of the armies of France, and he sent his 
troops forward on a wide front between Soissons 
and Rheims. By the middle of April the Germans 
had lost twenty thousand prisoners and a large 
number of guns. The high ground north of the 
Aisne along the ridge known as the Chemin des 
Dames (Road of the Ladies) was taken, and the 
German losses in killed, wounded, and prison- 
ers reached the great total of two hundred thou- 
sand. It seemed as though the French armies 
were in a good position to break the German lines. 
But their losses had been heavy, and the Chamber 



210 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

of Deputies at Paris became alarmed. They re- 
fused to allow General Nivelle to proceed with his 
attack, on account of the great loss of life, and a 
little later he was relieved of the chief command, 
the position being given to General Petain. But 
the high ground here, as well as in Flanders, was 
now in Allied hands, and the positions of the Ger- 
mans were under constant observation and artil- 
lery fire. 

In November the British struck at the famous 
Hindenburg Line opposite Cambrai. The attack 
was made without the usual long-continued artil- 
lery preparation, and was thus in the nature of 
a surprise. A large number of tanks had been 
assembled, unknown to the Germans, and when 
they advanced, tearing down the barbed-wire en- 
tanglements, and killing the German machine gun- 
ners at their posts, the British troops were able 
to advance almost at will. They went forward 
until the spires of Cambrai were in sight, and for 
a short time were completely through the Hinden- 
burg Line. Cavalry was sent forward, and it 
seemed as though the German lines had been defi- 
nitely broken. But the British, under General 
Byng, did not have the necessary reserves to fol- 
low up the attack. The success of the tanks had 
surprised them almost as much as it had surprised 
the enemy. Had the British been able to send a 
quarter of a million men through the gap they 
had created, the Germans would have been driven 



MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 211 

out of France, but these men were not at hand. 
Consequently, when the Germans launched strong 
counter-attacks a few days later, the British out- 
posts were driven back, and much of the ground 
gained was recovered by the enemy. It was dur- 
ing these counter-attacks that American troops 
first fought against the Germans. American en- 
gineers, working on the railways behind the Brit- 
ish lines, were caught in the German advance, and 
throwing down their picks and shovels, took up 
rifles and aided the British in repelling the enemy. 
It was to the Italians that the Allies looked for 
success during the closing months of 1917. The 
armies of Italy, driving forward along the Bain- 
sizza Plateau toward the northeast, had reached 
a position only thirty-five miles from the city of 
Laibach, sometimes called the key to Vienna. 
They were also within sight of the city of Trieste. 
The campaign from August until October gave 
promise of the most brilliant results. Then Ger- 
many once more came to Austria's aid, and the 
whole situation was changed. German agents had 
been busy, sowing the seeds of revolt through- 
out the Italian armies as they had previously done 
along the Russian front. The Italian soldiers 
were told that the Allies had deserted them. 
Newspapers, printed in Germany but supposed to 
come from Rome, were scattered throughout the 
Italian armies, containing articles to the effect 
that the Allies had been defeated, that London 



212 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

had been captured by the Germans, and that re- 
sistance was useless. Suddenly the German and 
Austrian forces struck a terrific blow against the 
Italian lines in the vicinity of the town of Capo- 
retto. Traitors behind the Italian lines gave false 
orders to retreat. Almost before the Italian com- 
mander, General Cadorna, realized what had hap- 
pened, the Germans and Austrians were pouring 
through the Italian lines and descending into the 
fertile plains of Venetia. 

The whole Italian front was obliged to retreat. 
The army became demoralized. A quarter of a 
million troops were made prisoners, and thousands 
of guns were captured. As the Italian armies re- 
treated in disorder to the southwest, they aban- 
doned position after position at which the world 
hoped they might make a stand. For a time it 
seemed as though the whole of northern Italy 
might be overrun by the invaders, and the way into 
southern France left open to the Teutonic forces. 
The situation was very grave, and French and 
British reinforcements were hurried to the Italian 
front. 

The Italians, however, while badly beaten, were 
by no means overcome. When they reached the 
line of the river Piave they made a stand. This 
river crosses northern Italy, from the mountains, 
to the Adriatic Sea near the historic city of Ven- 
ice. There were furious battles along the river, 



MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 213 

and also in the mountain passes to the north, but 
the Austrian drive was stopped. The Italians lit- 
erally died at their posts. Their losses in men 
and material were enormous, but Italy was saved. 
The stand of the Italian armies along the Piave 
was one of the most remarkable military recoveries 
in history. Its success is credited largely to Gen- 
eral Diaz, who replaced General Cadorna as the 
Italian commander-in-chief. 

The Allied front in Macedonia, north of Saloniki, 
was still comparatively inactive, but during this 
long period of inactivity many preparations had 
been going on. The Serbian forces, retreating 
ragged and starving through the mountain passes 
of Albania, were taken by the Italian Navy to the 
Island of Corfu, and here were strengthened, re- 
freshed, and supplied with the necessary equip- 
ment. In this way a new Serbian Army was built 
up which later in the war was to win great vic- 
tories. 

The situation in Greece had by now become so 
acute that the Allies decided to take drastic action. 
With Athens under the guns of Allied war-ships, 
King Constantine was forced to abdicate in favor 
of his son Alexander, and with his German wife 
he fled from the country and took refuge in Swit- 
zerland. As a ruler he had done little or nothing 
to advance the cause of the Greek people, and 
when upon his retirement Premier Venizelos took 



214 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

the reins of government in his hands, matters soon 
began to assume an aspect favorable to the Allied 
cause. 

On the eastern front the Russians, in July, at- 
tempted an advance in southeastern Galicia, and 
achieved a momentary success by capturing the 
cities of Halicz and Kalusz, with prisoners and 
booty. The disorganization which was spreading 
so rapidly through the Russian armies, however, 
rendered the advance but a flash in the pan. 
Within a few weeks German and Austrian forces 
began a series of strong counter-attacks which soon 
drove the Russians back to their frontiers. As a 
fighting-unit the Russian Army no longer existed. 

In Palestine the British and French expedition 
from the Suez Canal and up the Sinai Peninsula 
was making steady progress. Advancing under 
the greatest difficulties through the desert country 
east of the canal, the forces under General Allenby, 
assisted by the Arab tribes which had revolted 
against the rule of the sultan, swept up the coast 
and captured Gaza, known in Biblical history as 
the city from which Samson carried away the 
gates. This success was quickly followed by the 
capture of Jerusalem. The fall of this historic 
city was of unusual significance. Not since the 
days of the Crusaders had Jerusalem been in 
Christian hands. With the utmost reverence Gen- 
eral Allenby entered the city on foot, and took 
possession of the place in the name of the Allies. 



MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 215 

The site of the Holy Sepulcher thus finally passed 
from the control of the sultan. 

At once the effects of Turkish misrule began to 
disappear. Jews, Syrians, Arabs, and the other 
elements which made up the population of the city, 
safe beneath the flags of Great Britain and the 
Allies, went about their affairs in peace, with sure 
knowledge that justice would be maintained. 
North of Jerusalem the Turkish armies, under the 
command of their German leader, Field-Marshal 
Liman von Sanders, entrenched themselves in 
strong positions in the hills, barring the Allied ad- 
vance toward Damascus. 

In Mesopotamia the British-Indian advance up 
the river Tigris was making excellent progress. 
General Aylmer, who had failed in his attempts 
to relieve General Townshend a Kut-el-Amara, 
was succeeded by General Maude, who pushed his 
way northward until he reached the outskirts of 
Bagdad. After a spirited engagement the city 
fell, and the British continued their advance north- 
ward in the direction of Mosul. At Bagdad, how- 
ever, General Maude was suddenly taken ill, and 
died within a few days. He is supposed to have 
been a victim of cholera, although there were 
rumors that he had been poisoned. The advance 
northward continued under the command of Gen- 
eral Marshall. 

General Marshall's right flank, which it had 
been hoped might be linked up with the Russians 



216 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

operating in northern Persia, was suddenly ex- 
posed by the collapse of the Russian armies. The 
campaign in the Caucasus, which had begun so 
brilliantly, went to pieces, and soon the Turks had 
recaptured Erzerum and were pressing eastward 
on the heels of the retreating enemy. Detach- 
ments working toward the southeast into northern 
Persia were thus on General Marshall's right 
flank, and he was obliged to proceed with the 
greatest caution. 

Between the forces of General Marshall in Meso- 
potamia and those of General Allenby in Pales- 
tine lay the great Arabian desert. The British 
plan of campaign was as follows: General Mar- 
shall's forces were to work northwestwardly, 
around the eastern fringe of the Arabian desert, 
through Mosul, while General Allenby 's armies 
were to advance northeastwardly, around its west- 
ern edge, through Damascus. These two lines 
of march would thus converge and meet at the 
city of Aleppo, on the Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad, 
south of Constantinople. Joining here, they 
would threaten that city with attack from the 
south. It was an ambitious plan; the distances 
to be traversed were great — many hundreds of 
miles — but steady progress was made, and suc- 
cess would result in putting Turkey out of the 
war. Events in Europe, however, were far too 
serious for the Allied commanders to attach great 
importance to these operations in Asia Minor. 



MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 217 

Defeat on the western front, in France, would 
quickly render them of little or no value, and con- 
ditions in Russia were such as to cause many to 
feel that such a defeat was by no means out of the 
question. 

During the year 1917 the development of the 
airplane had progressed with giant strides. The 
Zeppelin, of which so much had been expected, 
had proved to be a costly failure. The perfecting 
of the anti-aircraft gun soon rendered it dangerous 
for these vessels, presenting as they did such large 
targets, to expose themselves over fortified places, 
and when a fleet of them was in large part de- 
stroyed in a raid over London, the Germans dis- 
continued their construction and devoted them- 
selves to the development of the airplane. 

When the war broke out England possessed 
about a hundred of these heavier-than-air craft, 
but it was not long before the number grew into the 
thousands, and she was rivaling Germany in the 
size of her air fleet. France and Italy, too, devel- 
oped machines of great speed and power, and the 
aerial navies of the several countries at war soon 
took on formidable proportions. At first the prac- 
tice was to develop individual flyers of great brav- 
ery and skill, whose scores in enemy planes shot 
down mounted until in some cases they approached 
the hundred mark; but these men, set upon by 
groups of enemy machines, were in time killed and 
it became apparent that better results could bo 



218 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

obtained by operating airplanes in squadrons, and 
hence the individual flyer became subordinated to 
the work of the aerial fleet. 

Three classes of planes came into general use. 
One was the small and very swift combat plane, 
used to protect groups of heavier machines em- 
ployed in bombing-operations, or in observation 
work. A second was the bombing-plane, of great 
size and carrying at times several men, together 
with thousands of pounds of bombs to be dropped 
on enemy fortifications, munition plants, railroad 
yards, junctions, and the like. A third class con- 
sisted of planes used for observation work, and 
especially for photographing the enemy's lines. 
The English perfected a system of making double 
photographs, which, when placed in a stereoscope, 
showed the object pictured in relief, so that the 
height of trench parapets, gun emplacements, and 
the like could be determined with a considerable 
degree of accuracy. As the war drew to a close, 
many instances occurred of airplanes being used 
for direct attack upon bodies of men, transport 
trains, and batteries on the ground, the swift-mov- 
ing aircraft descending to low levels and skimming 
along over trenches or roads, too low to be at- 
tacked by anti-aircraft guns, and moving too 
rapidly to be readily hit by the fire of infantrymen 
or machine guns. 

In spite of the lessons of the war abroad, the 
United States made little or no effort to equip its 



MILITARY OPERATIONS IN 1917 219 

army with aircraft prior to entering the war. 
After hostilities began a huge program was be- 
gun, but many and needless delays occurred, and 
when the war came to a close American aircraft 
production was just getting under way. Had the 
conflict been prolonged, the United States forces 
would have had at their command more airships 
than were possessed by all the Allied armies com- 
bined. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

EFFECTS OF THE KUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

RUSSIA, during the year 1917, progressed rap- 
idly toward complete anarchy. Having no 
central government worthy of the name, the coun- 
try began to break up into a number of separate 
states. The Cossacks of the Don region declared 
their independence. Siberia refused to submit 
to the misrule of the Bolsheviki at Petrograd, con- 
trolled by Lenine and Trotzky. The great wheaF- 
growing country of the Ukraine, bordering on the 
Black Sea, set up a separate government. Li- 
vonia, Esthonia, Russian Poland, Finland, all de- 
clared themselves free from Russian control. The 
government at Petrograd, if government it could 
be called, had succeeded in disorganizing the army 
and disrupting the empire. Germany, anxious to 
remove her armies to the western front, proposed 
peace. 

Delegates from both countries met at the Rus- 
sian fortress of Brest Litovsk, now in German 
hands, in March, 1918. The government at Petro- 
grad was represented by Trotzky. The new 
Ukrainian republic also sent delegates. The Ger- 
mans proposed terms of peace which left them 

220 



EFFECTS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 221 

absolute masters of Russia, and these terms were 
accepted. Betrayed by the paid agents of the 
Bolsheviki, Russia was virtually placed in German 
hands. A pretense of self-government was al- 
lowed, but German forces of occupation were to 
see that the stores of grain and other food-stuffs 
were to be devoted to the feeding of the German 
people. The few clauses in the treaty which fa- 
vored the Russians, Germany at once repudiated. 
To her this agreement was merely another "scrap 
of paper." Under the pretense of maintaining 
order, German armies advanced into Russia, Ger- 
man military governors supplanted the local au- 
thorities, and the peasants were ordered to turn 
over to their German masters all stores of food- 
stuffs in their possession. It was expected that 
this food, shipped back to Germany, would relieve 
the dangerous food shortage in that country. 

By her own criminal methods, however, Ger- 
many defeated herself, as she had defeated herself 
from the first. The peasants of the Ukraine, of 
other parts of Russia, refused to give up their 
stores of food, even under torture, and soon were 
in open revolt. The whole country was given 
over to pillage, and guerilla warfare went on be- 
tween the German forces of occupation and the 
Russian peasants. The amount of food collected 
was disappointingly small, and what little finally 
reached Germany and Austria had no appreciable 
affect upon the situation. The rule of anarchy 



222 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

set up by the Bolsheviki satisfied no one. Every 
man who owned property of any sort, or land, was 
looked upon as an oppressor of the people, and 
was promptly robbed, or murdered. Organized 
industry ceased. The Bolsheviki claimed that the 
factories belonged to the people, but their efforts 
to operate them were failures. The Russian peas 
ants, in their mad dream of freedom, failed to 
understand that all effort must have an intelligent 
head to direct it. With every man's hand turned 
against his neighbor, there was no order, no co- 
operation, and hence no progress toward real free- 
dom. The Russian Czar, who had been sent by the 
revolutionists into eastern Russia, was accused of 
dealing with the enemy, and shot. His death, in 
July, 1917, had no effect on the situation. Russia 
was drifting rapidly into a state of anarchy, and 
it seemed clear that only a strong military force 
could bring about a stable government. 

In Rumania much the same state of affairs ex- 
isted. The German forces of occupation, under 
Field-Marshal von Mackensen, compelled the king 
and government of Rumania to conclude a treaty 
of peace which left that country virtually a vassal 
of Germany. On May 6 this treaty was signed, 
and Rumania ceased for the time being to be an 
independent nation. Here, as in Russia, the plan 
of robbing the peasants of their scanty stores of 
food was put into operation, but the results were 
disappointing. "What small stocks of food the 



EFFECTS OF KUSSIAN REVOLUTION 223 

people had they concealed, and very little found 
its way into Germany. 

The Russian Army, as an organized force, no 
longer existed. The advance toward Lemberg in 
July, under General Brusiloff, to which we have 
already referred, amounted to nothing. The doc- 
trines of the Bolsheviki had undermined the mor- 
ale of the army. The Russian soldiers no longer 
wished to fight. 

In the north the Germans attained a military 
success of considerable importance. Forces op- 
erating along the Dvina River captured Dvinsk, 
and advanced upon Riga from the south. The city 
quickly fell, and the road to Petrograd was open. 
The German fleet at the same time steamed into 
the Gulf of Riga and landed troops upon the is- 
lands lying in the gulf. These naval operations 
had no great significance, the most notable feature 
of them being the escape of the Russian fleet from 
the Gulf of Riga to the safety of the guns of 
Kronstadt, the great fortress at the head of the 
Baltic Sea, off Petrograd. 

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1917 the 
German troops in Russia flowed steadily westward. 
In the regiments which remained, older men, or 
those whose physical condition prevented them 
from undertaking the rigorous duties of active 
front-line work, were left in place of those who 
were more efficient. The greater part of the Ger- 
man heavy artillery was sent to France, in prep- 



224 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

aration for the greatest offensive that the world 
had ever seen. The German leaders knew that 
they must win a victory in 1918 or they could not 
hope to win at all, and they bent every effort to- 
ward that end. 




Photo by Press Illustrating Service. Inc. 

MARSHAL FERDINAND FOCH 

Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces 




© Harris & Ewing 

GENERAL JOHN JOSEPH PERSHING 

Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces 



CHAPTER XXIV 

AMERICAN FORCES ABROAD DURING 1917 

WE have already spoken of the excellent 
work done by the American Navy in for- 
eign waters. The number of merchant vessels 
sunk by the submarines of Germany was very 
large, but it had fallen far short of the total which 
the kaiser's government had expected. During 
1917 four million five hundred thousand tons were 
sunk, but the shipyards of America and the Allied 
countries were humming with activity, and there 
seemed every prospect that these losses, great as 
they were, would be made up. 

Over three hundred American war-ships of all 
sorts were sent abroad, manned by seventy-five 
thousand men. The great battle-ships joined the 
British fleet, thus still further increasing the odds 
against Germany, while destroyers and cruisers 
were employed to guard the transports which car- 
ried troops to France. As a result, only three 
American troop-ships were sunk by enemy sub- 
marines, and these were on their way home from 
France, so that the losses in men were very small. 
Many stations were built on the French coast from 
which American seaplanes operated, patrolling 
the waters off shore and guarding the incoming 

225 



226 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

transports from submarine attack. Admiral 
Sims, in command of the naval forces abroad, 
and Admiral Rodman, in charge of the United 
States battle-ship fleet, won the admiration of the 
Allied commanders by their efficient cooperation. 
It was due largely to these officers that the con- 
struction of a mine barrier across the North 
Sea between Scotland and Norway was begun. 
The German sea-going submarines were obliged 
to take this route in passing from their home ports 
to the ocean, and it was decided to stop them by 
placing in their path a barrier of explosive mines. 
Special mines were designed for this purpose, and 
the construction of one hundred thousand was be- 
gun. When the war ended, eighty-five thousand 
of these mines had already been made and sent 
abroad, and within a short time it would have been 
impossible for German U-boats to have left the 
North Sea by this route. 

The Marine Corps of the navy did splendid work 
ashore in France. The exploits of these fighting 
men will be mentioned later. In every respect 
the United States Navy proved ready and efficient, 
and its record during the war was one of which 
every American should feel proud. 

The work of the army began with the arrival 
in France of General Pershing and his staff. They 
were quickly followed by a regiment of engineers, 
which reached port late in June. By the end of 
October there were many United States troops in 



AMERICAN FORCES ABROAD 227 

France, and on the twenty-sixth of that month they 
first entered the trenches and began their training 
in actual warfare. 

It was well known to military men, both in the 
United States and abroad, that long-continued 
training was necessary, in order that troops might 
become familiar with the intricate details of trench 
warfare. The use of bombs, trench mortars, and 
the like, the construction of dugouts and shelters, 
the conducting of night raids, defense against gas- 
attacks, patrol work, all the details of this highly 
specialized form of warfare, were new to the Amer- 
ican soldier, and could be learned only by ac- 
tual experience. No matter how well drilled 
troops might be, this experience was necessary if 
trench warfare was to keep up, and one of the 
problems which confronted General Pershing and 
his staff was that of securing this experience for 
the American soldiers in the shortest possible 
time, in order that they might take their places 
in the line beside the veterans of England, France, 
and the other Allied countries. 

The first shot fired by American troops against 
the Germans was sent across the lines on October 
27, from a French 75-millimeter gun manned by 
United States artillerymen. Field-guns of this 
type were being manufactured in American plants, 
but special machinery for their construction had 
first to be built, and progress in turning them out 
was necessarily very slow. For this reason the 



228 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

United States forces abroad were obliged for a 
long time to depend upon guns of French make, 
and even when the war came to an end, the pro- 
portion of American-made artillery in France was 
very small. 

During the autumn and winter of 1917 minor 
trench operations were conducted by General 
Pershing's men along that section of the front 
lying south of Verdun, and known as the Toul sec- 
tor, because it was based on the French city of 
Toul. Gradually this entire sector was taken over 
by American troops, who began to learn the secrets 
of trench warfare from actual experience. The 
process, however, was exceedingly slow. It was 
well known that in open fighting the American sol- 
dier was the equal of any fighting-man in the 
world, but in trench work he was at a great dis- 
advantage. It remained for Germany in the final 
year of the war to commit another of her fatal 
blunders. Instead of holding her fortified lines 
in Belgium and France and defying the Allies to 
drive her from them, she deliberately advanced 
and gave battle in the open, thus at once bringing 
into the conflict hundreds of thousands of Ameri- 
can soldiers who had had no experience in trench 
warfare whatever, and in such warfare would have 
been of little immediate use against her. 

As the troops from America landed, they were 
sent at once to training-camps far behind the bat- 
tle-front, and here their instruction began, under 



AMERICAN FORCES ABROAD 229 

the direction of French and English veterans. 
While these fighting-units were in training, other 
detachments were engaged in the construction 
work made necessary by the coming armies. Lum- 
bermen from the South and the West found them- 
selves operating sawmills in the French forests in 
the Vosges Mountains, and elsewhere. Engineers 
prominent in the civil life of America were to be 
seen building roads, bridges, railways, camps, 
docks, and storage depots of every sort. Famous 
doctors and surgeons gave their skill in providing 
for the sanitary welfare of the coming armies. 
Organizations such as the Red Cross, the Young 
Men's Christian Association, the Knights of Co- 
lumbus, the Salvation Army sent their represen- 
tatives abroad to provide for the comfort and well- 
being of the troops. Many thousands of skilled 
mechanics, disdaining the high wages which were 
being paid to such men at home, gave their services 
to the government at a soldier's pay in order to 
go abroad and do their part in the great work of 
construction behind the lines. Among both these 
men and the combat units were to be found many 
negroes, who proved their bravery and devotion 
to the country not alone in work behind the lines 
but equally so at the front, where their courage 
in attack, especially with the bayonet, attracted 
wide-spread attention. 

The organization of the United States Army 
abroad differed somewhat from that of the armies 



230 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

of the Allies. In order to understand fully the 
operations in which the Americans took part dur- 
ing the year 1918, the details of this organization 
should be grasped. 

The American "division" as it is called, was 
much larger than the divisions of the European 
armies, and comprised in all some 28,000 men. Of 
these men, there were four regiments, consisting of 
three battalions each, or twelve in all, in the first 
line. Each battalion consisted of four companies 
of 250 men each, or 1000 men to the battalion. 
The first line infantrymen numbered therefore 
12,000 men. There were also a regiment of en- 
gineers, a machine-gun battalion, a brigade of ar- 
tillery consisting of three regiments, and a signal- 
corps battalion, a trench-mortar battery, and the 
necessary transport, medical, and police units. 
Taking the division as a unit, six were required to 
make up an army corps, namely, four combat di- 
visions, one depot division, one replacement di- 
vision, and two regiments of cavalry. Three to 
five of these army corps constituted an army. 
It will thus be seen that an army corps embraced 
168,000 men, and an army, from 500,000 to 840,000 
men. Two American armies were in operation 
when the war came to a close, and a third was in 
process of formation. 

No victories on the field of battle were won by 
the American Expeditionary Forces abroad dur- 
ing the year 1917, but in war the greatest victories 



AMERICAN FORCES ABROAD 231 

are not always won on the field of battle. The 
thousands of young Americans who landed in 
France daily were creating a menace to the power 
of the kaiser which neither he nor his generals 
could afford to ignore. Their sneers were for 
the consumption of the people at home ; they them- 
selves knew that when the American forces reached 
their maximum strength German imperialism was 
doomed, and hence they made frantic efforts to 
gain a decision before that strength was reached. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAE 1918 

THE year 1918 began very quietly, from a mil- 
itary standpoint, yet it was merely the quiet 
before the storm. Preparations for the great 
German offensive went on with feverish activity. 
The German leaders hoped to obtain a military 
decision of some sort during the year, upon which 
a negotiated peace might be based. Yet there was 
growing throughout the world a feeling of op- 
position to the German plans which rendered 
victory for the kaiser impossible. The British, 
French, Italians, and Americans, while Germany's 
principal opponents, were by no means her only 
ones. Portuguese troops held a sector of the 
front in France. Brazil and Cuba had entered the 
lists and were preparing expeditions. China, at 
war with Germany, proposed to send troops to the 
front, while hundreds of thousands of Chinese la- 
borers were at work behind the lines in France. 
Polish regiments, recruited on both sides of the 
water, went to the front under their own flag. 
From every part of the world men came to as- 
sist in bringing about the defeat of Germany. It 
was recognized everywhere that, no matter what 

232 



BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1918 233 

the cost, the forces of the kaiser would have to be 
beaten. 

In addition to their constant air attacks upon 
the submarine bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend, the 
British Navy made a gallant and successful at- 
tempt to render these ports useless for the German 
under-water boats. An expedition was prepared 
with the greatest secrecy, having as its object 
the blocking of these ports by sinking vessels 
across their channels. At night, under cover of 
smoke screens, the antiquated war-ship Vindictive 
was sent into the harbor of Zeebrugge, accom- 
panied by other craft, including a submarine 
loaded with high explosives. The submarine was 
driven against the Mole, an artificial breakwater 
which forms the Zeebrugge harbor, and exploded, 
while at the same time the Vindictive, together 
with the Thetis, the Intrepid and the Iphigenia, 
loaded with concrete, were sunk in the entrance of 
the canal leading to Bruges. The loss of life on 
the Vindictive and the destroyers which accom- 
panied her, exposed as they were to the concen- 
trated fire of the German shore batteries, was very 
heavy. The Vindictive was hit one thousand 
times, but the British sailors and marines did not 
flinch, and the operation was successfully carried 
out. The results at Ostend were not so satisfac- 
tory, but at both places the channels were seriously 
obstructed, and although the Germans tried their 
best to clear them, the daily bombing-operations 



234 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

carried on by Allied air forces prevented them 
from doing so. This success seriously impaired 
the efficiency of the German submarine campaign. 

The Germans, in some spirit of desperation, at- 
tempted a submarine attack along the American 
coast. U-boats, equipped for a long stay at sea, 
crossed the Atlantic and began operations against 
American coastwise shipping. They did not at- 
tempt to attack the United States transport serv- 
ice, efficiently guarded by American cruisers and 
destroyers, but confined their efforts to sinking 
barges, fishing-boats, and sailing vessels along 
the New England coast. Their depredations 
amounted to nothing, from a military standpoint, 
and the American public laughed at them. 

The constant bombing of London and Paris from 
the air caused the Allies to retaliate. Great bomb- 
ing-planes were sent over the German cities along 
the Ehine, and many munition factories, chemical 
works, and the like were destroyed. Germany 
began to get a taste of the horrors she had been in- 
flicting upon the cities of England and France, and, 
as has been pointed out in a previous chapter, she 
promptly begged that such bombing-operations 
should cease. 

It is of interest to note that while autocracy in 
Germany and the nations allied with her was 
steadily becoming weaker, in the great democratic 
nations opposed to her it was becoming stronger. 
This apparent paradox requires explanation. 



BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1918 235 

Some one has said that the most perfect form of 
government in the world would be a "benevolent 
autocracy." This may be true, but autocracies 
are rarely benevolent, and thus the nations living 
under democratic rule have placed about their rul- 
ers many safeguards by which their powers would 
be regulated and curbed should any tendency ap- 
pear toward the gathering of too much authority 
in the hands of any one man. In times of war, 
however, these constitutional regulations and safe- 
guards must of necessity be set aside, and the men 
in authority be given power which they would not 
need in times of peace, and which in such times 
would be promptly taken away from them. Thus 
we find in England the chief authority centered 
during this war in the prime minister, Lloyd 
George ; in France, in Olemenceau, called because 
of his savage energy "The Tiger"; in Italy, in 
Premier Orlando; and in the United States, in 
President Wilson. These men, possessing the con- 
fidence of the people of their respective nations, 
wielded for the time being almost, if not quite, 
as much power as the kaiser himself. In fact, as 
we have already said, the people of Germany and 
Austria were beginning to show signs of restless- 
ness under their autocratic form of government. 
Reforms were demanded by them which would 
limit the power of their rulers as such power 
was limited in more democratic countries. This 
movement on the part of the people of the Central 



236 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Powers, as Germany and her allies were called, 
ultimately exercised a profound effect in bringing 
the war to an end. 

In March, 1918, the final test of military strength 
began. The conflict which followed constitutes 
the military history of the year 1918. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 

The German Offensive 

T^TE use the expression "The Great Battle 
V V of 1918," because throughout that entire 
year, from March, when the weather makes fight- 
ing possible, until November, when it usually comes 
to a halt on account of cold and rain, a huge battle 
was in progress. No such battle as this had ever 
been fought before, and it is devoutly to be hoped 
that no suoh battle will ever be fought again. 
The conflict involved, on the two sides, and on the 
various fronts, forces amounting to over twenty- 
five million men, and although the battle was 
fought over many areas widely removed from one 
another, it was really but one vast and final conflict 
between the forces of autocracy on the one hand, 
directed by General von Ludendorff, and the 
forces of democracy on the other, directed by 
Marshal Ferdinand Foch. It was in truth a bat- 
tle of giants. 

In a general way the Battle of 1918 may be di- 
vided into six great phases, as follows: 

(1) The German Offensive. 

(2) The Allied Counter-Offensive. 

237 



238 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

(3) The Austrian Drive against Italy and the 
Italian Counter-Offensive. 

(4) The Allied Drive against Bulgaria. 

(5) The Campaign in Palestine. 

(6) The Campaign in Mesopotamia. 

We will deal with these various phases of the 
battle as they occurred. 

First let us note the position of the American 
troops on the western front. It had been found 
that the training afforded by placing the men on 
quiet sectors of the line was far too slow. It was 
necessary that these troops should more quickly 
gain experience in actual fighting. As a result 
many American regiments were brigaded with the 
English and the French, that is, were placed under 
the command of generals of these nations, and 
sent to the front as units of their divisions or army 
corps. Soon we find American soldiers operating 
at many points along the long line from the North 
Sea to Switzerland, notably in the Champagne 
country, upon the battle-front in Picardy, in Flan- 
ders, and elsewhere. By the end of April, 1918, 
half a million American troops had been landed 
in France, in spite of the desperate efforts made 
by the German submarines to stop them, and the 
menace of their presence was felt all along the 
front. 

We have spoken in a previous chapter of the 
so-called peace made by the Germans with Russia 
and the Ukraine at Brest Litovsk. It is probable 



THE GREAT BATTLE OP 1918 239 

that the Germans knew this peace could not be 
permanent, but it did suffice to enable them to move 
their troops to the western front, and begin the 
tremendous and final effort toward victory by 
which they hoped to end the war. The great gen- 
eral staff knew very well that if they did not win 
in 1918, they could not win at all, since the increas- 
ing number of American troops would ultimately 
counterbalance the superiority in numbers which 
the bringing of men from Russia temporarily gave 
them. It seemed to be clearly a case of "now or 
never. ' ' 

It is said that there was some disagreement on 
the part of the great general staff as to the advis- 
ability of making this huge and desperate attack. 
Von Hindenburg, the nominal chief of staff, is re- 
ported to have opposed it, contending that it would 
be wiser for Germany to hold fast to what she had 
in Belgium and France by defending her powerful 
Hindenburg Line, and defying the Allies to drive 
her from it. But von Hindenburg 's power had 
begun to wane. His younger and more audacious 
assistant, General von Ludendorff, who held the 
position of quartermaster-general, urged the at- 
tack by every means in his power and promised the 
kaiser and the German people that he would win a 
great victory. His plan was to break through the 
British and French lines where they joined along 
the river Somme, and sweep down the Somme Val- 
ley to the sea. A glance at the map will show the 



240 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

results to be expected from such a manceuver. By 
taking the city of Amiens, and reaching the mouth 
of the Somme, Ludendorff hoped to cut the British 
and French forces in two. The armies of Great 
Britain would be crowded to the northwest against 
the channel ports, while those of France would be 
driven back upon Paris. It would then be an easy 
matter to attack and defeat each in detail. The 
plan, Napoleonic in its strategy, aroused great 
enthusiasm in Germany when it later on became 
known. Von Ludendorff was the idol of the peo- 
ple, the man of the hour. Filled with hope of vic- 
tory, the kaiser gave the word to go ahead. 

General von Ludendorff 's plans had been care- 
fully made. A new system of attack had been 
worked out, known as the "von Hutier" system, 
because it was first employed by the general of 
that name against the Eussians in the drive on 
Kiga. From every regiment throughout the army 
the strongest and most active men were selected 
and formed into special units known as shock bat- 
talions. These shock troops were to lead the at- 
tack, leaving the poorer men to bring up the rear, 
as well as to guard those sections of the front 
which were relatively quiet. A tremendous use of 
gas was planned, not of the older kinds which had 
been released along the trenches to be blown by 
the wind into the opposing lines, but of newer and 
deadlier gases, enclosed in liquid form in shells, to 
be hurled from guns of large caliber into areas far 




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JERUSALEM 

The conqueror of Palestine, General Allenby, entering the captured city on foot 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 241 

behind the enemy's front. One of the worst of 
these new gases was known as mustard gas, be- 
cause of its odor. It had the power to cause ter- 
rible burns, and penetrated the thickest clothing. 
Areas drenched with it remained uninhabitable for 
many hours, and its slightest touch would send a 
man to the hospital for weeks. Special light field- 
artillery was built, to be drawn by men, instead of 
the horses ordinarily used, and these light pieces 
were to be employed to demolish the enemy's 
trenches, fortifications, and tanks. Thousands of 
trench mortars were employed to prepare the at- 
tack. The men detailed for special service, such 
as bomb-throwing, or the use of liquid fire, were 
carefully drilled in their particular duties ; in fact, 
the whole attack was rehearsed in secret behind 
the lines as carefully as a theatrical manager 
might rehearse a play. Every man knew exactly 
what he had to do. 

Naturally the Allied commanders realized that 
the attack was impending, and made preparations 
to resist it. But their greatest difficulty lay in 
the fact that they could not know at what point 
along the many hundreds of miles of battle-front 
the attack would take place. The ' ' initiative, ' ' as 
it is called, lay with the Germans, and this gave 
them one advantage which is always possessed by 
the attacking forces, namely, that of surprise. 
They might elect to drive toward Verdun, or 
through the Champagne country about Rheims, or 



242 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

along the Somme, or to the coast in the direction 
of Calais. Not knowing what the Germans meant 
to do, the Allies were unable to concentrate their 
reserves at any one point, since all points had to 
be protected. This was the first disadvantage un- 
der which the Allies labored. The second, which 
had impeded their efforts all through the war, 
arose from the fact that they had no unity of com- 
mand. Their different armies were all under dif- 
ferent leaders. There were the Belgians under 
King Albert, the British under Field-Marshal 
Haig, the French under General Petain, the Ital- 
ians under General Diaz, the Americans under 
General Pershing. These different commanders 
consulted one another, of course, but each had his 
own ideas, his own plans. There was no concerted 
action, none of that singleness of purpose which 
had rendered the Teutonic armies so formidable 
from the first. General von Ludendorff com- 
manded from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf, 
from Riga to Palestine, and this gave him a tre- 
mendous advantage. 

Germany, her vast preparations completed, be- 
gan the attack on the morning of the twenty-first 
of March. The front chosen stretched for nearly 
fifty miles north and south of the river Somme, 
from near Arras southward to the river Oise. The 
German efforts were immediately and enormously 
successful. Heavy mists, throughout the early 
morning, aided in the surprise. The British first 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 243 

positions were taken almost before their defenders 
knew that an attack had been launched. The Ger- 
man shock troops, accompanied by their detach- 
ments of light artillery and machine guns, liquid- 
fire projectors and bomb-throwers carried out 
their carefully rehearsed plans as though they had 
been on parade, and tore through the British lines 
almost at will. Meanwhile a concentrated bom- 
bardment had drenched the territory behind the 
Allied positions with great quantities of gas, ren- 
dering the bringing up of reinforcements and sup- 
plies very difficult. The British and French were 
of course greatly outnumbered, in some cases 
fighting four and five to one. This resulted from 
the fact that the Germans had concentrated, on 
the front chosen for the attack, a huge body of re- 
serves, which they threw into the battle with reck- 
less fury. The location of the attack had been 
carefully hidden. Even the German troops them- 
selves did not know their leaders' plans. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of men had been concentrated 
at central points far behind the lines, concealed 
during the day from Allied airmen, in forests and 
ravines. During the night before the attack they 
began to move, marching many miles in the dark- 
ness, and arriving upon the scene of battle in the 
morning, when they were at once thrown into the 
fight. 

The British Fifth Army under General Gough, 
which held the southern end of the English lines, 



244 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

where they linked up with the French, was not 
defeated — it was overwhelmed, suffering huge 
losses in men and guns. The Allied troops along 
the entire line of the attack fought with the most 
desperate bravery, holding their positions against 
greatly superior numbers until they were shot 
down or surrounded and forced to surrender. 
Their artillery and machine guns, playing on the 
dense masses of the advancing enemy, caused tre- 
mendous slaughter in his ranks. Line after line 
was swept away, but still the Germans came on, 
filled with the promise of a great and final victory. 
Under their iron discipline they marched in close 
formation over the British trenches, closing up 
their ranks as hundreds fell, yet never ceasing to 
advance, often over piles of their own dead. In 
many cases the British and French machine guns 
became red-hot from continuous firing, and had 
to be abandoned. In others the supplies of am- 
munition were exhausted and the confusion behind 
the lines caused by the incessant gas-bombard- 
ment prevented their being renewed. 

Fighting doggedly, the British and French fell 
back, holding point after point with the utmost 
courage, while waiting for their reserves to come 
up. The fighting was no longer conducted from 
permanent trenches, these having long ago been 
passed in the Allied retreat. Open warfare of the 
old order was now in progress, the men taking 
cover in ruined houses, behind walls, or in such 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 245 

shallow shelters as they could dig in the earth in 
the few hours given them to intrench. Without 
sleep or food for days, the retreating troops fought 
until they dropped from exhaustion, but still the 
great German advance went on. 

As has been pointed out, the Allies' reserves 
were held at certain points behind the lines, ready 
to be sent wherever they were most needed. But 
the bringing up of large bodies of men, with their 
equipment, requires much time. The British re- 
serves in France were small. Many men had been 
withdrawn to work in the shipyards, on account 
of the great losses caused by the German sub- 
marines. There was also a reorganization of the 
British armies going on, having to do with the 
reduction of the number of men in each division. 
To some extent the British were caught unpre- 
pared, and it was to the French that they were 
obliged to look for reinforcements with which to 
check the retreat of General Gough's demoralized 
army. French troops, hurried up from the south, 
were thrown into the battle on both sides of the 
Somme. 

But the German advance had gained tremendous 
momentum. Like an avalanche it rolled on, sweep- 
ing everything before it. The people of the Allied 
nations held their breath as day by day, during 
that first black and terrible week, the Germans 
drove on mile after mile until it seemed that noth- 
ing could stop them. Pessimists began to say that 



246 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

the end had come, that Germany was on the eve 
of winning the war. To add to the spirit of de- 
moralization which sprang up, the Germans had 
begun to bombard the city of Paris with a long- 
range gun, capable of throwing a sihell over sev- 
enty miles. The gun was a huge 15-inch naval 
piece, taken from one of the German super-dread- 
noughts lying idle in the Kiel Canal. By mount- 
ing it to fire at a high angle, and using what is 
called a sub-caliber projectile, that is, a shell 
smaller than the bore of the gun, but so constructed 
as to receive the explosive force of the powder 
charge intended for a shell much larger and heav- 
ier, the Germans were able to surprise the world 
by shelling Paris from a distance of seventy-two 
miles. The shells, dropping at regular intervals 
in the streets of the French capital, killed and in- 
jured many persons, but if the Germans expected 
the French to be terrified, they were mistaken. 
Paris, grave and determined, read the bad news 
from the Picardy front and went on its way un- 
dismayed. Frightfulness had once more failed. 

Day after day the British and French lines along 
the Somme bent back — ten, twenty, thirty, forty 
miles — like a huge bow, but they did not break. 
At one point the Germans came so near to break- 
ing through that they were held back only by a 
hastily assembled force of engineers, stretcher- 
bearers, camp servants and other non-combatants. 
These men, seizing rifles, bringing up machine 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 247 

guns, stopped the dangerous gap in the British 
lines until reinforcements could arrive. Many 
Americans, some of them engineers, fought here, 
under the command of General Carey, of the Brit- 
ish Army, and for several days only this impro- 
vised force prevented the Germans from sweeping 
through to Amiens and separating the French and 
British armies. 

No troops, however well trained and equipped, 
can continue an advance such as the Germans were 
making, without becoming exhausted, and also 
without getting ahead of their transport and their 
heavy guns. When they had gone forward close 
to fifty miles, the armies of General von Luden- 
dorff began to slow up, waiting for food, ammuni- 
tion, artillery. At the same time, as more re- 
serves reached the British and French, the resist- 
ance became stronger. But the Germans were 
within sight of Amiens, their immediate objective, 
and shells from their heavier guns had already 
begun to fall in the town, and upon the cathedral. 
The situation was desperate. Then something 
took place which changed the aspect of things 
over-night. This was the appointment of General 
Ferdinand Foch, whose name we have heard be- 
fore, to the position of supreme commander or 
generalissimo of all the Allied forces. An event- 
ful meeting took place, when the situation looked 
blackest, between General Foch, General Petain, 
the French commander-in-chief, and Field-Mar- 



248 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

shal Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the British. 
They sat about a small table in a village behind the 
lines, and General Foch traced upon the table-top 
his plan to save Amiens and stop the German ad- 
vance. General Foch did not displace General 
Petain, the heroic defender of Verdun, as com- 
mander-in-chief of the French ; nor in fact, did he 
displace any of the other Allied generals. He was 
placed in supreme command over them all. 

General Petain, Field-Marshal Haig, General 
Diaz, the Italian commander, and General Per- 
shing all welcomed the opportunity to concentrate 
the supreme command, in this dark hour, in the 
hands of the brilliant French strategist. On the 
fourteenth of April Foch assumed charge of the 
situation with the simple announcement that 
Amiens would not fall. Nor did it. The Germans 
were stopped at Montdidier, a few miles east of 
the city, and there they were held, unable to ad- 
vance another mile. The great German drive 
had gained much territory, and inflicted heavy 
losses upon the Allies in killed, wounded, prison- 
ers, and guns; but their own losses had been huge, 
and they had failed to accomplish what they set 
out to accomplish, namely, to break the Allied lines 
and drive a wedge between the British and the 
French. Exhausted by their own efforts, the Ger- 
mans in Picardy paused to re-form their forces 
for a new attack. General von Ludendorff's 
strategy possessed one fatal defect. Human ma- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 249 

terial could not endure the strain necessary to 
keep the mighty effort going. Like some ponder- 
ous engine deprived of its steam the German at- 
tack was forced finally to come to rest of its own 
weight. 

Before this, General Pershing, putting aside for 
the moment his own plans for attack in the sector 
south of Verdun, about Toul, placed the entire 
forces under his command at the disposal of Mar- 
shal Foch, to be used as the latter might see fit. 
Troops were sent from Toul to increase the French 
reserves about Montdidier, and early in May, 1918, 
it was arranged that the British were to transport 
from America ten divisions, to be used along the 
northern part of the line, from the North Sea south 
to Arras. 

These troops, it will be remembered, had had 
no actual experience in trench warfare, but they 
were ready to attack whenever the opportunity 
offered, and their superiority over the German 
troops was soon made apparent. The day the 
German drive began, March 21, 1918, Premier 
Lloyd George of England, realizing that the Allies 
were outnumbered, called upon President Wilson 
for one hundred and twenty thousand American 
troops monthly. The President replied that if 
England would supply the ships, the United States 
would furnish the troops. England did supply 
the ships, and the number of men asked for each 
month from the United States was not only sent 



250 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

but doubled. Premier Lloyd George has since de- 
clared that when the appeal of March 21 was made 
the situation of the Allies was desperate. 

The German belief that the American troops 
would not fight was a gigantic blunder. As early 
as May 28 the results of it were apparent. On 
that date an American division on the Picardy 
front near Montdidier undertook and carried out 
an attack against the town of Cantigny, capturing 
all their objectives with a speed and dash that at 
once demonstrated to both the Allied commanders 
and the enemy that in fighting of this sort the 
troops from the United States had no superiors. 

Meanwhile the Germans, foiled in their attempts 
along the valley of the Somme, began new and more 
desperate thrusts further to the north, in the hope 
of finding a weak spot in the Allied lines. Vio- 
lent but unsuccessful attacks were made against 
the British opposite Arras, after which the large 
reserves of Crown-Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, 
who commanded the German forces in Flanders, 
were hurled forward along the valley of the river 
Lys, south of Ypres. In huge numbers the Ger- 
mans swept over Messines Ridge, so brilliantly 
taken by the Canadian forces during the previous 
year, and reached and took Kemmel Hill, in spite 
of the desperate defense offered by the British, 
and the French reserves which had been sent north 
to assist them. This hill formed an important 
part of the English system of defenses. There 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 251 

were, however, other hills to the west of it which 
remained in Allied hands. 

The fighting in this attack was of the most des- 
perate character. The Lys Valley is narrow, com- 
pared with the valley of the Somme, and the great 
German armies crowded into the new and small 
salient created by their advance were subjected 
to terrific artillery fire from the British guns on 
the high ground surrounding it to the west. 
Their losses were great, but they kept on with the 
utmost determination. This ridge of hills, of 
which Kemmel was one, was the last natural de- 
fensive position between the Germans and the 
coast. Had they taken it, nothing could have pre- 
vented them from reaching the channel ports and 
thus realizing their long-cherished ambition. But 
although the Germans got as far as Merville, just 
east of the important railway junction at Haze- 
brouck, they could progress no further. Field- 
Marshal Haig issued his famous order, telling his 
men that they were fighting with their backs to 
the wall and must die rather than give up more 
ground, and the line held. The Germans had 
driven a second great salient into the Allied lines, 
the first being in Picardy. 

A salient, in military parlance, is an indentation 
or bulge, formed by forcing back the enemy's lines 
without breaking them. Thus, in the great drive 
to Montdidier the Germans advanced in the center 
nearly fifty miles; yet the two ends of the bulge 



252 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

thus formed, resting on Arras in the north and the 
line of the Oise in the south, held firm. It was as 
though the Allied lines had been stretched into a 
huge semicircle, as a rubber band might be 
stretched, while still tightly held at each end. The 
same conditions existed in the valley of the Lys. 
The anchor positions of the salient at the north- 
ern and southern ends held fast, and the Ger- 
mans were unable to take them. The kaiser came 
in person to witness the attack on Kemmel Hill, 
and some of his utterances at this period of the war 
indicate that he felt not the least doubt of a great 
German victory. Yet by the first of May General 
von Ludendorff had so exhausted himself by his 
attempts that it was a whole month before the 
German armies were once more able to make an 
advance. The Allies used the month to good ad- 
vantage in strengthening their positions. 

The third great drive of the Germans took place 
at the end of May, two months after the opening 
of the campaign in Picardy, and proved to be as 
much of a surprise to the Allies as those which 
preceded it had been. This time the Germans 
struck straight toward Paris. 

They had employed the weeks which had elapsed 
since the drive in Flanders in making their usual 
careful preparations. The world wondered, dur- 
ing these weeks, why Marshal Foch did not strike. 
The great strategist, however, intended to do far 
more than merely drive the Germans back on the 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 253 

Picardy front; he was maturing plans to win 
the war. Meanwhile, the steady stream of Amer- 
ican troops crossing to France at the rate of a 
quarter of a million men a month was providing 
him with the forces he needed with which to strike, 
when in his opinion the time to strike had come. 

The third German drive was made on a front 
of about thirty-five miles, and was aimed toward 
the south, from the positions the German armies 
had held for so long upon the north bank of the 
river Aisne. Its objective was Paris, and there 
is no doubt that it caught the Allies napping. The 
French front, naturally very strong because of the 
hold they had secured the year before upon the 
high ridge north of the Aisne known as the Chemin 
des Dames, was lightly held, and many of the 
troops on this part of the front were veterans of 
the intense fighting in Picardy and Flanders, who 
had been sent to the Aisne sector to rest. The 
Chemin des Dames was thought to be the strong- 
est natural position along the entire western front, 
and it is unlikely that the French expected the 
Germans to attack it. When they did so, the Ger- 
man armies under the command of the crown- 
prince tore the Allied line to pieces. 

The French and British troops in the front lines 
from Soissons in the west to Rheims in the east 
were almost annihilated, and the Germans crossed 
the Aisne on a wide front. Between them and 
Paris lay three rivers, all valuable as defensive 



254 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

positions — first the Vesle, then the Ourcq, then the 
Marne. These rivers were very familiar to the 
Germans, since it was across them that they had 
retreated northward after their great defeat at 
the Battle of the Marne in 1914. So complete were 
the preparations of the Germans, so great their 
numbers, that they swept almost without a check 
across two of these rivers and once more found 
themselves approaching Paris at the Marne. 
Again the huge German machine slowed up of its 
own weight. Rheims had been placed in a dan- 
gerous salient, but the attack died down. Soissons 
was once more in German hands. The situation 
looked blacker to the Allies than ever. 

The German thrust toward Paris reached the 
banks of the Marne at the town of Chateau- 
Thierry, a name which will always be famous in 
American history as that of the place where a 
battalion of United States machine gunners, be- 
longing to the Marine Corps, checked the victor- 
ious German advance. These men, brought to the 
front in motor-vehicles, went into battle on June 
6, and by their coolness and bravery prevented the 
Germans from crossing the river at this point. 
Chateau-Thierry lies on both sides of the Marne. 
The American machine gunners held the south 
bank, and served their guns so effectively from 
behind ruined walls and other shelters along the 
bank of the river that all the efforts of the Ger- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 255 

mans to cross were in vain. At last the old stone 
bridge across the river was blown up by French 
engineers, and the many Germans crowded upon it 
perished. American troops had already distin- 
guished themselves in France, in the taking of 
Cantigny, and the Allied commanders felt no 
doubts as to their bravery, but it was at Chateau- 
Thierry that the world came to realize their value 
as soldiers under the most striking and dramatic 
conditions. 

As soon as the drive toward the Marne came to 
a standstill, the Germans attempted another ma- 
neuver. The great bulge in the Picardy country 
toward Amiens, and that in the Marne region to- 
ward Paris, were separated, hung up, as it were, 
by the French positions between them, along the 
river Oise. If these positions could be taken, and 
the French driven toward the southwest, the two 
great salients could be united in one, forming a 
vast semicircle from Arras to Rheims, the cir- 
cumference of which would almost touch Paris. 
With a salient so vast in his hands, von Luden- 
dorff would have the room necessary to manoeuver 
his great armies in a final drive toward the French 
capital. This attack along the Oise had as its ob- 
jective the city of Compiegne. To the satisfaction 
of the Allies, it failed. The French lines were 
held in force, and although the Germans managed 
to gain a few miles, the attack brought them 



256 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

no results of importance, and French counter-at- 
tacks soon regained much of the territory which 
had been lost. 

Meanwhile, desperate fighting continued along 
the Marne front, in which United States troops 
covered themselves with glory. At Belleau Wood, 
on the Metz-to-Paris road, furious attacks were 
launched by picked German troops. They were 
opposed by units of the Marine Corps, and here 
some of the most terrible fighting of the war took 
place. The marines, with superb courage, not only 
broke the German attacks but advanced, and by 
June 11 had captured most of the wood. It was 
an immensely strong position, filled with concealed 
machine-gun nests, but in spite of the strength of 
the position, the best German troops were out- 
fought, and the wood taken at greater cost to the 
enemy than to the Americans. So pleased were 
the French by this success that they officially 
changed the name of the wood to the "Bois de la 
Brigade de Marine" (Wood of the Marine Bri- 
gade). 

Again, on July 1 American troops captured the 
town of Vaux, in a brilliant assault, carried out 
with clockwork-like precision. Everywhere the 
soldiers from overseas showed a courage, a con- 
tempt for danger, which won the admiration of 
the Allied command. General Pershing had hur- 
ried up to the support of the French in the Cha- 
teau-Thierry sector the Third Division, which had 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 257 

just come from its preliminary training in the 
trenches, and the Second Division, which had been 
held in reserve near Montdidier, and which con- 
tained the units of the marines who fought so gal- 
lantly at Belleau Wood. These regulars and ma- 
rines proved themselves to be the equals of any 
troops in the world. Other units were also now 
available for use with the French, owing to rein- 
forcements which the British had received, and 
five of the ten divisions which had been operat- 
ing on the British front were withdrawn for use 
further south. 

In this fighting along the Marne in June and 
early July, it is reported that on one occasion 
orders were issued by the French command for 
the American troops to retire, and that General 
Omar Bundy, in command of the Second Division, 
U. S. A., met this order with a reply which thrilled 
the American public as few things had thrilled 
it since the beginning of the war. "We regret 
being unable to follow the counsels of our masters, 
the French," General Bundy is said to have writ- 
ten, "but the American flag has been compelled to 
retire. This is unendurable, and none of our sol- 
diers would understand not being asked to do 
whatever is necessary to reestablish a situation 
which is humiliating to us and unacceptable to our 
country's honor. We are going to counter- 
attack." 

Counter-attack they did — presumably, however, 



258 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

with the permission of the supreme command — 
with the result that the German advance toward 
Paris was stopped. All America sent up a cry of 
triumph. The American troops had met the best 
men that Germany had to offer, and had beaten 
them decisively. Many persons believe that but 
for the valor of these American troops Paris would 
have fallen. 

It is impossible to say just what effect the fight- 
ing at this point had on the general situation. 
That so brilliant a commander as Marshal Focli, 
with his great drive against the weakly-held Ger- 
man right flank in preparation, would have left 
the road to Paris open, seems incredible. Pos- 
sibly he issued the order to retire, knowing that 
the further the Germans got south of the Marne, 
the worse their situation would be when they at- 
tempted to get back. The French and British had 
faced a similar situation in 1914, which culminated 
in the first Battle of the Marne. Only their long 
and painful retreat made that victory possible. It 
would undoubtedly have been humiliating to the 
American forces to be obliged to fall back, but 
the Allies had been obliged to retreat on many oc- 
casions in the past, and had done so without loss 
of morale. 

And yet, in spite of these considerations, it is 
probable that this action on the part of the Ameri- 
can troops around Chateau-Thierry did more to 
bring about Germany's final defeat than any num- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 259 

ber of tactical successes would have done. It told 
the German soldiers something that they had not 
yet fully realized, something that their leaders 
had carefully hidden from them — that the Ameri- 
can fighting-man was not only their equal but their 
superior. This knowledge, spreading rapidly 
throughout the German Army, and then to the peo- 
ple at home, caused an impairment of morale of 
incalculable value to the Allies. The Germans re- 
alized that victory against increasing numbers 
of such men was impossible, and hence it may well 
be said that the American successes at Chateau- 
Thierry marked the beginning of the end of the 
war. Psychological factors are often as impor- 
tant as — sometimes more important than — actual 
victories in the field. Had the American forces 
carried out their orders and retreated, Paris might 
not have fallen, but the Germans would have said 
to themselves, "The Americans are falling back. 
They are afraid to face us," and this belief on 
their part would have greatly strengthened their 
determination to win. On the contrary, the bril- 
liant work of the American regulars and marines 
disheartened them, made them see that their ef- 
forts were hopeless. As a result, the German 
armies began to go backward. From their defeat 
at Belleau Wood on they never won a battle of 
any consequence. A German officer, colonel of a 
guard regiment, said to his captors, "These Amer- 
icans are terrible. For every ten you kill, there 



260 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

are a hundred in their places, seeming to spring 
from the ground. Nothing seems to stop them, 
and we — we are weary of war. " It is of particu- 
lar interest to note, as an example of the bravery 
with which the American soldiers in France fought, 
that during the many engagements in which they 
took part, they captured from the Germans close to 
fifty thousand men, while themselves losing in 
prisoners less than five thousand. 

General von Ludendorff, everywhere foiled in 
his attempts to secure a decision, now began to pre- 
pare for a final effort. The summer was rapidly 
slipping away. The steady flow of troops from 
America continued. If the German high com- 
mand had ever felt any doubts of the ability of the 
American soldier to fight, those doubts had been 
fully set at rest. It was indeed ''now or never" 
if Germany was to win a victory during the re- 
maining weeks of 1918. Von Ludendorff hurried 
his preparations. He was ready to resume his 
drive across the Marne by July 15. It was the 
only thing he could do. In the valley of the Lys, 
in Picardy, he could not hope to accomplish now 
what he had failed to accomplish in the spring. 
The Allied lines had been too well reinforced. In 
desperation he struck straight for Paris, hoping 
that such a brilliant success as the capture of the 
French capital would restore his rapidly diminish- 
ing military reputation and delude the grumbling 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 261 

people at home into believing that they had really- 
won a victory. 

The attack took place on the anniversary of the 
fall of the Bastille, or to be exact, in the early 
morning hours of the day after, the Germans sup- 
posing, no doubt, that after the celebration of 
their national holiday the French would be unpre- 
pared. The armies of the crown-prince flung 
themselves at the Allied lines on a front which 
extended from Chateau-Thierry east and north 
around Rheims, and on through the Champagne 
country half-way to Verdun. The attack was al- 
most a total failure. From Rheims eastward the 
French, assisted by British, American, Italian, 
and Polish troops, did not budge an inch. On the 
contrary, under the brilliant leadership of Gen- 
eral Gouraud, they threw back the attacking col- 
umns with tremendous losses and in some places 
succeeded in gaining ground. 

In this fighting east of Rheims General Gouraud 
introduced new tactics. When the German bom- 
bardment of his front-line positions began, he with- 
drew his men to the rear. Then, when the Ger- 
mans advanced over the shattered trenches expect- 
ing the French to be annihilated, they were first 
met with a terrific curtain of fire, or "barrage," as 
it is called, after which the Allied troops swept 
forward and cut them to pieces with the bayonet. 

These barrages, first introduced by the French, 



262 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

soon became an important factor in infantry ad- 
vances. By carefully regulating the fire of a large 
number of guns, usually of the French 75-milli- 
meter type, stationed far in the rear, it was found 
possible to place ahead of the advancing troops 
a wall of exploding shells, usually shrapnel, 
through which it was almost certain death to ad- 
vance. Sheltered behind this curtain of fire the 
men formed for the attack, and when the barrage 
was "lifted," that is, when the range was in- 
creased so that the line of exploding shells was 
placed further ahead, the troops swept forward. 
When this movement of the fire curtain was contin- 
uous, the curtain slowly advancing, it was called 
a "creeping" or "rolling" barrage, and the at- 
tacking troops were expected to follow behind it> 
taking care not to advance too rapidly and thus be 
caught in the fire of their own guns. 

General Gouraud's success prevented the Ger- 
mans from driving another great salient into the 
Allied lines between Rheims and Verdun, and thus 
taking the French and American lines south of 
Verdun in the rear. But it was in the loop west 
of Rheims, the wedge projecting down to the 
Marne at Ohateau-Thierry, that the danger lay. 
In spite of the brilliant work done by the Ameri- 
can machine-gun detachments in holding the 
bridges across the Marne at Chateau-Thierry in 
June, the Germans had been able to effect crossings 
of the river further to the east, and were making 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 263 

a desperate attempt to work their way behind the 
city of Rheims and thus surround and capture it. 
As a result, the troops at Chateau-Thierry had 
been obliged to withdraw. Then came the final 
German effort to reach Paris. 

The drive across the Marne was no more success- 
ful than had been that further east. The concen- 
tration of German troops at the point of the wedge 
was large and the crown-prince, in the hope of 
breaking the Allied lines, threw into the attack his 
very best men. The Germans were now about 
forty miles from Paris, and to the general public 
the situation looked dark, although Marshal Foch 
was about to afford the enemy a great surprise, of 
which the public knew nothing. 

When the troops of the crown-prince swept 
across the Marne they were heavily attacked by 
the American and French forces south of the river, 
and thrown back with enormous losses. Once 
again the Germans were outfought. Chateau- 
Thierry was retaken and the German backward 
movement had begun. 

The great German offensive of 1918 came to 
an end at the Marne. General von Ludendorff 
had sacrificed a vast number of men, his reserves 
were greatly depleted, yet he was as far from vic- 
tory as ever. In spite of the reassuring reports 
issued by the great general staff, reports intended 
to allay the growing discontent of the German peo- 
ple, Germany was beaten, and the kaiser and his 



264 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

generals knew it. Now Marshal Foch, at last 
ready to strike, began his tremendous counter- 
offensive. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 

The Allied Counter -Offensive Begins 

ON July 18 Marshal Foch struck his first great 
blow against the forces of the kaiser, an at- 
tack along the German right flank from Chateau- 
Thierry northwest to the city of Soissons. It was 
conducted by French and American troops under 
the command of General Mangin, and achieved a 
great success. 

As we have seen, the Marne salient or wedge was 
over thirty miles broad at its base, which ran 
eastward from Soissons to a point north of 
Rheims. As the German advance progressed to- 
ward the Marne, the salient became narrower, 
finally ending in a point which rested upon the 
Marne in the neighborhood of Chateau-Thierry. 
So confident had the Germans been of success that 
they did not take steps to protect properly their 
long western flank, extending from Soissons to 
Chateau-Thierry. It was their weak point, and 
Marshal Foch knew it. Hence he began to con- 
centrate his forces to the west of the German line 
of advance, bringing up large bodies of men and 
many guns under cover of darkness and conceal- 

265 



266 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

ing them in the forest of Compiegne. Many 
American divisions, even those with but slight 
training, were placed at Marshal Foch's disposal 
by General Pershing, and did splendid work in the ' 
attack. Without the usual preliminary bombard- 
ment, the advance began early on the morning of 
July 18, behind a rolling barrage, and made rapid 
progress. In spite of the reserves brought up by 
the enemy, the attack progressed steadily, and at 
the expiration of five days' fighting the Americans 
had taken the heights dominating Soissons, while 
all along the line they and the French troops fight- 
ing with them had captured many villages, and 
sent to the rear thousands of prisoners and a large 
number of guns. The German leaders began to 
see that unless they quickly withdrew their men 
from the Marne salient, there was every probabil- 
ity that they would be cut off. 

Before taking up a discussion of the battles 
which now followed one another in rapid succes- 
sion, let us examine briefly Marshal Foch's strat- 
egy and compare it with that of General von Lu- 
dendorff. 

The German commander-in-chief placed his faith 
in huge, powerful strokes, resembling blows with 
a battle-ax, or a two-handed sword. It has been 
characteristic of the Germans throughout history 
to fight with such weapons. After each of these 
great blows there was necessarily a long wait, 
while the next one was being prepared, and dur- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 267 

ing such a wait the enemy was able to recover him- 
self and strengthen his positions. Marshal Foch, 
on the contrary, began to strike the German lines 
at many points, delivering against them lightning- 
like thrusts not unlike those made with a French 
rapier, each thrust forming part of a definite and 
comprehensive plan which had as its purpose not 
merely to drive the Germans out of Belgium and 
France but to defeat them utterly by capturing or 
destroying their forces. 

Only by capture or destruction can an army be 
finally defeated. Mere gains of territory here 
and there result in nothing decisive. Marshal 
Foch had made up his mind to crush the Germans, 
and it is a noteworthy fact that when the kaiser's 
government finally asked for a cessation of hostil- 
ities, the German armies were at the great French 
commander's mercy, their situation so critical that 
within a short time they would have been obliged 
to surrender. Such was Marshal Foch's ambi- 
tious purpose, and in spite of the fact that the 
fighting season was half gone when he began his 
counter-attack in July, he still hoped that with 
ordinary weather conditions he would be able to 
accomplish his aims before the- end of the year. 

We must look at the map of Belgium and France 
to appreciate what now followed. The northern 
end or flank of the German line rested, as we know, 
upon the Belgian coast of the North Sea, the 
southern end on the frontier of Switzerland. 



268 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Neither could be "turned"; that is, Allied forces 
could not by any strategic means be moved around 
the ends of the German line, since the heavy Ger- 
man fortifications on the coast of Belgium pre- 
vented the landing of such forces in the north, 
while the neutrality of Switzerland prevented an 
outflanking operation in the south. Marshal Foch 
conceived two great plans. One was to surround 
and capture the German armies in Belgium and 
France by crushing in the two ends of the gigantic 
salient which their northern battle-line formed, 
one end of which rested on the North Sea, the other 
on the fortress of Metz, near Verdun, and the other 
was to drive a great wedge of his own into German 
territory south of Metz, thus cutting the whole 
German line from Belgium to the Swiss border- in 
two. Such an operation, if successful, would re- 
sult in the German armies in the north — that is, in 
Belgium and France — being captured, while those 
in the south, from Metz down the eastern frontiers 
of France to Switzerland, being separated from 
the northern armies, could not go to their assist- 
ance. 

No such vast plan of campaign was ever before 
conceived by a military commander, because no 
such conditions of battle as existed in France had 
ever before confronted such a commander. Be- 
fore the fighting ended in the early part of Novem- 
ber, Marshal Foch had practically accomplished 
the first part of his plan. The second part was 



THE GKEAT BATTLE OF 1918 269 

never carried out, because the war was over before 
it could be put into execution, but a large American 
army under General Pershing was ready to strike 
on the very day that hostilities ceased. 

The attack of General Mangin against the west- 
ern side of the Marne salient, which began on July 
18, sent the Germans hurrying back from the 
Marne toward the positions from which they had 
started, on the Aisne. But they could not retire 
immediately, because they had sent down into the 
Marne salient immense stores of food, ammuni- 
tion, and other supplies, and many heavy guns, in 
anticipation of their advance upon Paris, and 
all this accumulated material they desired to take 
back with them. Hence they fought desperately 
to hold back the French-American advance from 
the west, as well as the advance from the south 
being made by French and American troops who 
had crossed the Marne to its northern bank and 
were driving the Germans ahead of them. 

Attacks were also begun from Eheims westward, 
and for a time the public thought that Foch in- 
tended to drive from both directions across the 
base of the Marne salient and cut it off, as one 
might close the mouth of a bag by drawing a string, 
with the result that the men and material in the 
salient would be captured. The Marne salient, 
however, was too broad at its base, and too shal- 
low, for such a plan to succeed, and it is unlikely 
that Foch expected it to do so. Also, the German 



270 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

resistance was very strong, many divisions being 
rushed to the crown-prince's aid from the armies 
in Flanders. What Marshal Foch did accomplish 
was to drive the Germans back toward the Aisne 
with extremely heavy losses in both men and ma- 
terial. The greater part of their heavy guns they 
saved, but they were obliged to abandon or destroy 
large quantities of ammunition and other stores. 

Since the opening of the German offensive in 
March, the nature of the fighting, as we have be- 
fore pointed out, had changed, and was now, for 
the time being at least, largely in the open. The 
American troops, unskilled though most of them 
were in trench warfare, were able in this open 
fighting to take their places beside any soldiers 
in the world. This rendered them available al- 
most as soon as they landed, and these young men 
from every part of the Union — fresh from cities, 
villages, farms, of many races and creeds, white 
or black — were soon displaying the most superb 
heroism all along the battle-front, from Flanders 
to Verdun. At the river Ourcq, where the Ger- 
mans attempted to make a stand on their retreat 
to the Aisne, at the river Vesle, where they held 
for a considerable period, these young Americans 
performed countless feats of valor. In fact, the 
French officers, who had been obliged by great 
losses to conserve the lives of their men in every 
possible way, considered the Americans too reck- 
less. 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 271 

Fearlessly led, they would dash forward with 
the utmost bravery against the hundreds of con- 
cealed machine-gun nests with which the Germans 
strove to cover their retreat, and heedless of their 
losses, would kill the gunners and capture the guns. 
These machine-gun detachments consisted of 
picked men, left behind by the Germans to hold 
back the enemy while the bulk of their forces es- 
caped, and although they faced almost certain 
death, they fought with the greatest courage and 
determination. The English and French had 
learned by bitter experience to attack these guns, 
hidden in every conceivable place, by the use of 
tanks and light field-artillery, or by outflanking 
them and taking them in the rear, but the Amer- 
icans at first disdained all such devices, and swept 
forward in costly frontal attacks. It was not 
long, however, before they, too, learned not to sac- 
rifice themselves so recklessly; but, as had been 
pointed out, this very recklessness helped to win 
the war by showing the Germans the nature of the 
men with whom they had to deal. 

Throughout all this open fighting there was a 
tremendous use of airplanes, not only for observ- 
ing the disposition of the enemy's forces, and 
photographing his lines, but also in actual fight- 
ing. On many occasions airplanes would descend 
to within a few hundred feet of the opposing 
columns, and attack them with machine-gun fire, 
while supply-trains were frequently dispersed and 



272 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

destroyed by the use of both machine guns and 
bombs. In these operations the American avi- 
ators did notable work, although usually in planes 
of foreign make, owing to the slowness with which 
the great airplane program in America went for- 
ward. This was true of many classes of equip- 
ment. General Pershing reported, after the close 
of the war, that only 1379 airplanes of American 
make were in Prance when the war ended, and 
that in the artillery branch all the guns of the 75- 
millimeter (3-inch) and 155-millimeter (6-inch) 
types in use by the army were manufactured in 
France by the French Government, with the excep- 
tion of 109 of the first-named type. The same 
thing was true of tanks. Had the war extended 
into the year 1919, the American Army would have 
been fully supplied from factories at home, but 
through the genius of Marshal Foch it was brought 
to a close earlier than any one expected. The 
shortage which existed in tanks may have had 
something to do with the methods which the Amer- 
ican troops employed when attacking machine-gun 
nests. 

While the Germans were still trying to extri- 
cate themselves from the Marne salient, Marshal 
Foch struck the second of his lightning-like blows. 
This time the British, along the river Somme, were 
chosen for the attack, so that instead of striking 
at either side of the great Picardy salient, the blow 
was aimed at its center. Under General Rawlin- 



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The ruined main street 




© Underwood & Underwood 

Where U. S Marines defended the crossing of the Marne 

CHATEAU-THIERRY 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 273 

son the British troops advanced with their accus- 
tomed gallantry, and in a series of drives which 
began on August 8, forced the Germans back in a 
battle which has been called the Third Battle of 
the Somme, the second having been the German 
advance in March-April, and the first the great 
battle which took place in 1916, just after the at- 
tack on Verdun. This Third Battle of the Somme 
was hotly contested, the Germans resisting with 
great bravery, but soon Albert, Bray, and Combles 
had fallen and the enemy was forced back along 
the river in the direction of Peronne. 

Then followed other blows, now here, now there, 
short, swift, decisive. When strong resistance de- 
veloped against an attack at one point, and the 
Germans had strengthened this part of their line 
by drawing reserves to it from some other point, 
Foch, instead of driving on, would cease his efforts 
here and strike unexpectedly elsewhere. As a re- 
sult the German leaders became bewildered under 
the rain of blows. They did not know at what 
point on their long lines the next attack might 
come, and hence hesitated to shift their reserves. 
Many divisions had been sent toward the Marne, 
to help the crown-prince out of his dangerous posi- 
tion. Then, too, the new German lines were far 
longer than the old ones, curving as they did 
around the great salients which had been won, and 
being longer, they required many more men to 
hold them. 



274 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

At this stage of the battle the German leaders 
apparently concluded that having tried von Luden- 
dorff's plan of a great offensive, and failed, they 
would now try von Hindenburg's, which, it will be 
remembered, was to stand on the defensive in 
Belgium and northern France, and defy the Allies 
to drive them back. But such a stand could not 
be made in the hastily constructed defenses which 
formed the new German line. For this it was nec- 
essary to go back to the supposedly impregnable 
Hindenburg positions, and hence a retreat east- 
ward was begun. The Germans intended to carry 
out this retreat slowly, withdrawing their troops 
in a safe and orderly manner, hoping to hold off 
the Allies until the approach of winter rendered 
further operations impossible. Then, their states- 
men argued, their armies could be rested and re- 
fitted during the winter months, and meanwhile a 
peace might be secured by diplomatic means which 
would not be unfavorable to Germany. 

But Marshal Foch had no intention of allowing 
the Germans to do this if it lay in his power to 
prevent it. He determined not only so to shatter 
the German armies by constant attacks that they 
would reach the Hindenburg Line in no condition 
to defend it, but also to carry out operations which 
had as their purpose the destruction of the Hin- 
denburg Line itself. He saw things on a huge 
scale, and therein lies his greatness. A smaller 
man might well have been content to turn what a 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 275 

few weeks before had seemed a German victory 
into a German defeat. Foch, however, had bigger 
plans. He not only meant to defeat the Germans : 
he expected to win the war. 

American troops, acting with the British under 
General Rawlinson, captured the town of Morlan- 
court, after a brilliant attack, on August 10. 
Meanwhile, those operating north of Chateau- 
Thierry had crossed the Ourcq, and taken the town 
of Fismes, on the river Vesle. Elsewhere, with 
the British and French, the "dough-boys" were 
giving a good account of themselves, fighting hard 
but cleanly, and receiving everywhere the praise 
of the generals in command. 

All along the western battle-front, from Rheims 
to the North Sea, a series of blows was now crush- 
ing the Germans back toward the Hindenburg 
Line. The French, driving eastward from Mont- 
didier, took Lassigny and Roye after desperate 
hand-to-hand fighting, and their attacks north- 
ward, to the west of Soissons, began to threaten 
the Germans ' hold on the Aisne River even before 
the forces of the crown-prince, in their retreat, had 
reached it. English armies, with Americans aid- 
ing, were hammering at the Lys salient, and before 
long the Germans were driven from Kemmel Hill, 
and were falling back once more toward Messines 
Ridge. 

The Third Battle of the Somme began on a front 
from the vicinity of Montdidier in the south, to 



276 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

and beyond Albert, and by the end of August ex- 
tended as far north as Lens, its front being then 
over thirty miles. On August 24, by capturing the 
strong position of Thiepval, the British forced the 
enemy out of Bapaume and threatened Cambrai. 
Since the eighth the British had taken sixty thou- 
sand prisoners and several hundred guns, and 
the French were not far behind. On September 1 
the British took Peronne, and were driving south- 
east toward St.-Quentin. 

The French meanwhile were carrying out a 
series of brilliant operations east of Noyon, which 
they had taken, along the river Oise. They pur- 
posed through these to work themselves into posi- 
tions from which they might encircle the St.- 
Gobain Massif, a high plateau situated at the el- 
bow of the Hindenburg Line, where it ceased to 
run southward and turned sharply to the east. 
This position, with the fortified cities of Laon and 
La Fere, formed the great central anchor of the 
Hindenburg Line, and was considered impreg- 
nable. 

This Hindenburg Line, to which we have so 
often referred, was the position from which the 
Germans started their great drive in March. At 
some points they had advanced far to the west of 
it, while at others they had not advanced at all. 
One of the latter lay between Arras and Lens, at 
the northern end of the battle-front. Another 
lay north of Verdun, along the river Meuse. Mar- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 277 

shal Foch now began operations designed to cut 
the Hindenburg Line at both points, while the 
Germans were retreating, bewildered, between 
them. 

The attack in the north was made by the British 
under Generals Home and Byng. On the twenty- 
fifth of August Field-Marshal Haig's forces 
crossed the Hindenburg Line in the direction of 
Cambrai and Douai, south of Lens, and advanced 
down the Arras-Cambrai road toward what was 
known as the Drocourt-Queant switch-line, that is, 
a line built between those two towns in the rear 
of the old Hindenburg Line, and supposed so to 
reinforce it as to render it impossible of capture. 
On the twenty-eighth Croisilles fell, followed by 
Bullecourt, and on the second of September the 
British had cut completely through the Drocourt- 
Queant switch-line and were advancing in the open 
within a few miles of Douai and Cambrai. When 
we speak of the British, we refer of course to 
troops not only from England, Scotland, Ireland, 
and Wales, but also from Canada, New Zealand, 
Australia, and the other British possessions. All 
vied with one another in the bravery with which 
they fought for the mother country. 

This successful attack upon the Drocourt- 
Queant switch-line, which was carried out by the 
combined operation of infantry, tanks, and air- 
craft, was one of the decisive battles of the cam- 
paign. British cavalry now began to operate in 



278 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

the rear of the Hindenburg Line. Very much, 
however, remained to be done. Behind the Hin- 
denburg Line were other strong positions, con- 
nected with it by cross-lines, and a break at one 
point was local in its effect and did not mean that 
the whole line must fall. Successful in the north, 
Marshal Foch now turned to the southern end of 
the line, near Verdun. 

Here stood General Pershing, with a large and 
constantly increasing American army, ready to 
advance northward along the Meuse and cut the 
Hindenburg Line at its southern end. Before he 
could do this, however, it was necessary that the 
great St.-Mihiel salient, where the Germans had 
succeeded in getting across the Meuse south of 
Verdun in 1914, should first be eliminated. It will 
be remembered that this salient projected out 
across the Allied lines like a huge wedge, its point 
at the town of St.-Mihiel, on the Meuse, its base 
resting upon the Hindenburg Line in front of its 
powerful anchor position, the fortress of Metz. 
While this salient existed General Pershing could 
not with safety advance north along the Meuse, for 
the salient would lie across his rear, a source of 
great danger. To the Americans, therefore, was 
assigned the task of " wiping out" the St.-Mihiel 
salient. This was the first extensive operation 
undertaken by the American Army as an inde- 
pendent force, and needless to say it was carried 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 279 

out in a manner to uphold the army's best tradi- 
tions. 

On September 13 the battle began, and in just 
twenty-seven hours the salient had been destroyed, 
one hundred and fifty-five square miles of French 
territory had been recovered from the enemy, and 
over fifteen thousand officers and men had been 
captured, together with hundreds of guns and 
large stores of ammunition and supplies. No 
operation on any front during the course of the 
war had been carried out with greater precision 
and dispatch, and the news of the clean-cut and 
decisive victory surprised and delighted the Allied 
world. 

The attack was made by two separate forces, 
one driving north against the southerly side of 
the salient, the other driving east against its 
westerly side. It was planned to have these two 
forces meet, and thus cut off the salient as though 
with a pair of pincers. The distance to be covered 
was less in this case than in the case of the Marne 
salient; and General Pershing's plan to " close the 
bag," and thus capture the enemy within it, suc- 
ceeded. Accompanied by tanks, aircraft, and 
every other device of modern warfare, the "dough- 
boys ' ' attacked and once again the Germans found 
them to be irresistible. As soon as the attack be- 
gan to make definite progress the German com- 
manders, realizing that they could not hold the 



280 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

salient, began to withdraw their troops from it. 
Many escaped, but the number captured was large. 

It is of interest to note the vastness of the prep- 
arations made necessary for even a moderate-sized 
modern battle; for the operation at St.-Mihiel, 
compared with some of the great battles of the 
war, such as that at Verdun, was not large. It 
required, in the first place, the services of 600,000 
men, in and behind the lines, more than took part 
on both sides in any battle of the Civil War. A 
hundred thousand detailed maps and 40,000 photo- 
graphs were printed and distributed, showing 
accurately every trench, gun position, hillock, 
stream, road, or path within the enemy's lines. 
Five thousand miles of telephone wire were laid, 
connecting 6000 instruments. To operate this 
system alone required the services of 10,000 men. 
Carrier-pigeons, to carry messages back from the 
lines, were employed in thousands. Thirty-five 
hospital trains were provided for the wounded 
and over 70,000 beds, of which, fortunately, only 
a small proportion were needed. More than 
1,500,000 shells were fired during the battle, and 
millions of rounds of small-arm ammunition, while 
4800 automobile trucks were used to carry the 
men and supplies to the front. These few figures 
show clearly the magnitude of such an operation. 

In the St.-Mihiel engagement the American air 
forces were assisted by squadrons from both the 
French and the British, so that the total air forces 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 281 

engaged were the largest that had been assembled 
for any one operation on the western front. This 
gave the supremacy of the air entirely to the at- 
tack, and prevented the Germans from observing 
the preparations which were being made. 

At the same time that American armies were 
driving across the base of the salient from the 
south and west, French colonial troops attacked 
the point of the salient, opposite St.-Mihiel, and 
made their scheduled advance. After an artillery 
preparation lasting four hours, the two American 
forces, numbering about two hundred thousand 
men on the fighting-line, went forward, with tanks 
and squads of wire-cutters; the entanglements 
were leveled ; the infantry swept over the German 
front and support trenches, throwing the enemy 
into confusion. Almost before the Germans real- 
ized what had happened, the advancing columns 
met in the neighborhood of the town of Thiaucourt. 
So quick was their advance, so complete the sur- 
prise, that in some places the German cooks served 
to the Americans hot food that had been prepared 
for their own men, while a battery of guns in the 
salient kept on firing for hours quite unaware of 
the fact that they had long since been surrounded. 

The American victory at St.-Mihiel brought 
the Allied lines close to the outlying forts of the 
German fortress of Metz, which, it will be remem- 
bered, was the scene of a great French surrender 
during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Soon 



282 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

these outlying forts were under bombardment, and 
the civil population of the city began to flee into 
the interior. Keeping the German lines before 
Metz under constant pressure, General Pershing 
was now ready to begin his advance along the 
Meuse north of Verdun. His objective was Sedan, 
twenty-five miles to the north, and to reach it it 
was necessary to clear the Germans out of the 
great Argonne Forest, and to cross the most 
powerfully constructed line of fortifications in the 
world. Meanwhile, over a million and a half 
American troops had been landed in France, and 
the two-million mark was rapidly being ap- 
proached. 

A general survey of the situation in France and 
Belgium at this stage of the great battle shows 
that, in the north, the Allied attacks had cut the 
Hindenburg Line east of Arras, thus threatening 
the railroad running north through Cambrai, 
Douai, and Lille, and then eastward through Bel- 
gium into Germany by way of Liege. This was 
the first great avenue of retreat by which the Ger- 
mans might hope to take their armies back to the 
Rhine, in case of defeat. In the south, their other 
rail line of retreat ran through Mezieres and 
Sedan, toward which latter point General Pershing 
was now about to advance. In the center of the 
great arc, the German armies, badly beaten, were 
struggling to get back to the Hindenburg posi- 
tions, far in their rear, and forced to turn at every 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 283 

step and meet the terrific smashes of the English 
and French. The German situation was daily be- 
coming more critical. Let us leave this portion of 
the battle-front for a moment, and see what had 
been going on in other parts of the world. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 

Operations in Italy, Macedonia, Turkey, and 
Russia 

IN June, 1918, General von Ludendorff ordered 
the Austrians, who had remained quiet for a 
long time along the Piave River in Italy, to attack. 
He realized that his great drives in France had 
brought him no nearer to victory. The Austrian 
Army was still large and powerful, and he hoped 
that greater success might attend its efforts than 
had rewarded those of the Germans on the west- 
ern front. The object of the drive was to force 
the Italian armies along the river and in the moun- 
tains south of Trent to give way, thus allowing 
the Austrian forces to overrun northern Italy. 
This accomplished, the way into France from the 
southeast would be open, and the entire western 
battle-front might then be taken in the rear. It 
was an ambitious plan, but it failed. 

The Italian armies had been thoroughly reor- 
ganized after the disaster at Caporetto the pre- 
ceding year, and, with the assistance of British 
and French divisions stationed on their front, 
gave the world a surprise. The Austrian attack 
was not only a huge failure, resulting in only 

284 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 285 

trifling gains, but on June 23, a week after it be- 
gan, the Italians counter-attacked so successfully 
that they drove the enemy back over the Piave 
with losses estimated at close to one hundred and 
fifty thousand men. Here, however, the Italian 
armies halted, and the front again became quiet. 
Meanwhile brilliant torpedo-boat attacks on the 
Austrian naval bases of Polo and Cattaro, in the 
Adriatic, had resulted in the destruction of several 
Austrian war-ships of the largest type, while at 
the same time Italian contingents were fighting 
with splendid courage along the battle-front in 
France. 

Late in October, the Italian armies, acting in 
accordance with Marshal Foch's extensive plans, 
themselves attacked. A regiment of American 
troops had been sent to fight with them, not be- 
cause of any military necessity, but to show the 
Italian people that America was with them, heart 
and soul. 

The Italian attack began on October 24, and 
resulted in one of the greatest victories of the war. 
Close to two million Austrian troops held the front 
and reserve positions along the line from the 
mountains to Venice, at the head of the Adriatic, 
against which the Italian armies, with five divi- 
sions of French and English and the small Ameri- 
can contingent, now hurled themselves with the 
utmost valor. The Austrian lines crumpled as 
though they had been made of straw. In ten days, 



286 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

they had lost four hundred thousand prisoners, 
and close to seven thousand guns, while the losses 
in materials and supplies of every sort were colos- 
sal. Hundreds of villages, thousands of square 
miles of territory, were freed from Austrian domi- 
nation, and the advance had penetrated the 
enemy's lines for an average distance of thirty 
miles. Marshal Foch had delayed ordering the 
attack until bad weather had begun to make the 
provisioning of the Austrian armies in the moun- 
tains difficult. Every detail of the attack was 
thought out in advance with the greatest care, and 
the rapidity with which the Italian armies swept 
forward has seldom if ever been equaled in mili- 
tary history. Driving toward the northeast, the 
forces of General Diaz reached Vittorio Vaneto 
and Longarone, and cut the Austrians in the moun- 
tains off from those along the Piave, rendering 
their situation hopeless. On October 29, five days 
after the attack began, an Austrian officer came 
through the Italian lines under a flag of truce and 
asked that the fighting be stopped and an armistice 
granted. The Italians, suspecting some trick and 
questioning his authority, refused to enter into 
negotiations, and the attack went on. The next 
day a large delegation of Austrian army and navy 
officers, headed by one of their generals, ap- 
proached the Italian front near Rovereto and was 
taken at once to the headquarters of General Diaz. 
From here the request for an armistice was trans- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 287 

mitted to the Supreme War Council of the Allies 
at Paris (a council composed of representatives 
of the Allied nations, with power to deal with all 
matters pertaining to the military conduct of the 
war) and terms which amounted virtually to 
Austria's unconditional surrender were signed. 
By November 4 the Italian flag was flying over 
Trent and Trieste, and Germany's strongest ally 
had retired from the war. All Italy was ablaze 
with joy. 

Another of Germany's allies had preceded Aus- 
tria, however, in abandoning the cause of the Cen- 
tral Powers. This was Bulgaria, of which we 
have heard little since her unexpected attack upon 
Serbia in 1915. 

Affairs in the Balkan States had been quiet, on 
the surface at least, for a long time. The party 
in Greece favorable to the Allies, headed by Veni- 
zelos, had been steadily growing stronger, and in 
the spring of 1917, as we have shown, the Allied 
nations forced the abdication of King Constantine, 
and placed his son Alexander on the throne. The 
real ruler, however, was Venizelos, and under his 
direction the Greek Army had been quietly getting 
ready for war. On June 29 Greece declared war 
on Germany, and the Allies at Saloniki gained 
valuable reinforcements. It was not until Sep- 
tember, 1918, however, that the blow against Bul- 
garia was struck, and then it came with the force 
of a thunderbolt. 



288 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 



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THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 289 

equipped by the Allies, and later they rejoined the 
units stationed at the front north of Saloniki. In 
1916, assisted by the French, the Serbian forces 
made a considerable advance toward the northeast, 
and succeeded in driving back the Bulgarians and 
their Austrian and German allies from their posi- 
tions around Monastir. On November 19 the city 
fell, and the Serbians were once more in possession 
of their ancient capital, as well as of several thou- 
sand prisoners and many guns. Here the advance 
rested, until the great blow of 1918. The Allied 
force, which had lain idle at Saloniki for so long, 
and been the subject of so much adverse criticism, 
was now about to vindicate its long months of 
preparation. 

This force at Saloniki, now under the command 
of the French general Franchet d'Esperey, was 
made up of soldiers of many nationalities. In 
addition to the French, British, Italian, Serbian, 
and Greek contingents, there were men from the 
oppressed provinces of Austria, who had either 
been made prisoners, while fighting against their 
will in the Austrian Army, or had escaped from 
that country and joined their brothers in the fight 
for freedom. These Yugo-Slavs and Czecho- 
slovaks hoped, as a result of the war, to achieve 
their independence. 

Owing to the supreme efforts which Germany 
and Austria were making in France and Italy, the 
bulk of the forces of these two countries had been 



290 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

withdrawn from the Saloniki front, leaving to the 
Bulgarians the principal part in the task of keep- 
ing the Allies in check. There were, however, 
still considerable forces of Austrians operating in 
Albania, and both Germans and Austrians with 
the Bulgarian armies in the neighborhood of 
Monastir. 

In a general way, the Bulgarian forces were 
divided into two parts, one part operating in the 
west, around Monastir, the other in the east, 
around Lake Doiran, and along their own frontier. 
The valley of the Vardar, down which, it will be 
remembered, the great Austro-German invasion 
under von Mackensen passed in 1915, separated 
these two Bulgarian armies. In rough and moun- 
tainous country of this kind, with few roads or 
railways, communications are bad, and the sup- 
plying of troops with food and ammunition is a 
difficult problem. The Allied plan of campaign 
was to cut off the Bulgarian army in the west from 
that in the east by driving up the Vardar Valley. 

On September 14 the attack was begun, and 
soon spread along the entire front from Monastir 
to the Bulgarian frontier, a distance of over a 
hundred miles. On the right, British and Greek 
troops struck toward the Bulgarian border in the 
vicinity of Lake Doiran. Serbians, French, and 
the associated Slavic troops drove against the 
enemy's center, and around Monastir, while to the 
extreme left, where the battle-line crossed into 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 291 

Albania, an Italian army began a great outflanking 
operation. Along the entire front the Allies were 
brilliantly successful. Within a week they had 
advanced up the valley of the Vardar a distance 
of forty miles, and were threatening the Serbian 
city of Uskub. On the twenty-sixth of September 
the British on the right, who had fought their way 
across the Bulgarian frontier, entered the Bul- 
garian city of Strumnitza, on the road to Sofia, 
the capital. Three days earlier the Serbians, 
fighting savagely both to regain their homes and 
punish their Bulgarian enemies, stormed the 
Drenska Massif, forming the defenses of Prilip, 
and captured that city. French cavalry entered 
it on September 24 and the Bulgarians were re- 
treating everywhere in the greatest disorder. 

The advance up the Vardar soon cut the com- 
munications between the two Bulgarian armies, 
and the forces in the west, finding themselves in 
danger of capture, began a hurried flight eastward 
through the hills. By September 30 the French 
and Serbian forces entered Uskub, the enemy hav- 
ing fled after burning his stores. The battle was 
by this time a huge rout, with the Allied forces 
pursuing the fleeing Bulgarians in every direction. 
So serious had the situation become that as early 
as September 26 the Bulgarians saw that further 
resistance was hopeless, and announced that they 
were sending plenipotentiaries to Allied headquar- 
ters asking for a cessation of hostilities. There 



292 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

were rumors that the Germans, who had become 
alarmed by this sudden collapse of one of their 
allies, were sending von Mackensen with rein- 
forcements from Rumania, but the Bulgarians 
had had their fill of war. King Ferdinand, the 
Bulgarian ruler, who as we have previously seen 
had forced his unfortunate country into the con- 
flict by reason of his bargain with the kaiser, sud- 
denly abdicated in favor of his son Boris and fled 
from the country. 

Negotiations for an armistice were opened with 
General d'Esperey at Saloniki on September 28, 
and the Bulgarian envoys were told that the 
only terms they would be granted amounted to 
unconditional surrender. Forty-eight hours were 
allowed them to consider the matter, during which 
period the fighting was halted. The Bulgarian 
Government did not hesitate. On the thirtieth of 
September Bulgaria surrendered unconditionally 
to the Allies, and withdrew from the war, a month 
before the collapse of Austria under the heavy 
blows of Italy. This was the first breach, there- 
fore, in the ranks of the Central Powers, and the 
effect, both politically and from a military stand- 
point, was tremendous. 

In Germany a sense of defeat rapidly spread. 
The loss of Bulgaria cut Turkey off from her 
allies. Neither by the Berlin-to-Bagdad road nor 
by way of the Danube could the Germans com- 
municate any longer with Constantinople. By 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 293 

the use of the Bulgarian railroads, now open to the 
Allies, the forces at Saloniki could be quickly- 
transported southward to the Dardanelles, and the 
Turkish capital taken ; or they could be sent north, 
thereby not only freeing Rumania from German 
control, but, by crossing the Danube, quickly in- 
vading Austria itself from the south. Already 
the oppressed races in that loosely bound together 
country were seething with the spirit of revolt, 
and it needed only the presence of invading armies 
to bring about open rebellion. With these condi- 
tions in the rear, it is not surprising that the Aus- 
trians were unable to withstand the terrific as- 
saults of the Italian armies along the Piave in 
October. 

While Bulgaria's surrender terminated hostili- 
ties against her armies, the campaign against the 
Germans and Austrians in Serbia and Albania 
proceeded rapidly. French, Italian, Serbian, and 
Slav forces swept northward, clearing the enemy 
out of Albania, northern Serbia, and Montenegro. 
Nish, the strategic point on the Berlin-to-Bagdad 
railroad, soon fell, while in Albania the port of 
Durazzo was attacked from the sea by an Allied 
naval force, in which American submarines were 
included, and its defenses destroyed. Within a 
few days the city was occupied by Italian forces 
operating by land. The Serbians soon after 
reached the Danube, and crossing it, advanced 
into Austria. There was virtually no resistance. 



294 THE BATTLE OP THE NATIONS 

Within a few days Austria herself was to surren- 
der and withdraw from the war. 

During the month of September Turkey, with 
the Bulgarian disaster impending, was threatened 
in another quarter. We have seen that General 
Allenby, commanding the British and Allied forces 
in Palestine, had taken Jerusalem. He was now 
again on the move. 

Opposing him north of Jerusalem, on a line ex- 
tending from the sea southeastwardly to the river 
Jordan, were Turkish armies numbering one hun- 
dred and fifty thousand men, under the command 
of the German field-marshal Liman von Sanders. 
East of the Jordan, and between that river and 
the Arabian desert, was a considerable force of 
Arabs, who had revolted against the rule of the 
sultan, and formed the independent state of 
Hedjaz, under their king, Hussein I. These 
Arabs, operating with General Allenby, harassed 
the left wing of the Turkish armies. 

The nature of the country north of Jerusalem 
caused the British commander to undertake a bold 
stroke. The valley of the Jordan is separated 
from the sea-coast by a high range of hills, but 
along the coast itself is a narrow stretch of fairly 
level country, sloping down to the sea. General 
Allenby 's plan was first to engage the attention of 
the Turkish forces by attacking them in the east, 
along the valley of the Jordan. Then, while they 
were so engaged, he planned to break through 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 295 

their lines at the sea-coast by a sudden attack, and 
to send through the breach thus made a large force 
of cavalry, which force, by advancing rapidly 
northward, was to reach the rear of the Turkish 
armies in the Jordan Valley and surround them. 
Their flight eastward, across the Jordan, would 
be prevented by the Arabs. 

The plan succeeded perfectly. On September 
18 British and French forces began the attack, and 
the next day cavalry, including camel corps and 
Indian regiments, were pouring through the 
breach and sweeping rapidly up the coast. Turn- 
ing eastward toward the Jordan, this force occu- 
pied Nazareth, and the retreat of the two Turkish 
armies in the Jordan Valley was cut off. A third 
Turkish army, operating east of the river Jordan, 
was similarly isolated by the Arabs, who by cut- 
ting the railroad to Damascus at Derat, just east 
of the Sea of Galilee, destroyed their means of 
retreat. By the twenty-second of September the 
encirclement of the Turks was complete, and pris- 
oners began to surrender in large numbers. As a 
result of this remarkable victory General Alien- 
by 's forces captured nearly eighty thousand 
Turks, and five hundred guns. The remaining 
Turkish armies fled in small detachments into the 
mountains or the desert, and as an organized force 
ceased to exist. 

The German commander, Field-Marshal von 
Sanders, was severely criticized at home for allow- 



296 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

ing his forces to be surrounded. He himself nar- 
rowly escaped capture. In explanation of his 
defeat he said, after the war, that owing to deser- 
tions, and the fact that many Turkish troops had 
been sent to occupy Russian territory in the Cau- 
casus, he had by the first of August lost all hope of 
offering any effective resistance to General Alien- 
by 's advance, and that he had so telegraphed Gen- 
eral von Ludendorff, informing the latter that he 
must have reinforcements. There were no rein- 
forcements available, however, von Ludendorff 
having his hands full in Belgium and France. 
Marshal von Sanders's explanation is weak. If 
he could not resist, he might at least have saved 
his armies. Nothing can detract from the fact 
that the Allies, under General Allenby, won a re- 
markable victory, distinguished as greatly by the 
skill with which it was planned as by the energy 
with which it was carried out. Without loss of 
time the Allied forces pushed on to Damascus. 

This historic and beautiful city, the capital of 
Syria, fell on October 1, the demoralized Turks 
offering but slight resistance, and the advance 
continued toward Aleppo, one hundred and eighty 
miles to the northeast. Progress was very rapid. 
Another Allied force (that under General Mar- 
shall) was advancing toward Aleppo through 
Mosul and Bagdad. With Constantinople threat- 
ened from both the south, at Aleppo, and from the 
north by the armies at Saloniki, the Turkish Gov- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 297 

ernment, on October 12, opened negotiations for 
peace by sending General Townshend (who, it 
will be remembered, had been taken prisoner with 
his forces at Kut-el-Amara, on the Tigris, in 1915) 
to the British admiral in command in the Medi- 
terranean, with offers of surrender. Four days 
before, Enver Bey, the Turkish leader and friend 
of the kaiser, fled, as well as his co-conspirator, 
Talaat Bey, the Turkish grand vizier. Turkey, 
like Bulgaria and later on Austria, was now out 
of the war. 

We have referred in the last paragraph to the 
advance on Aleppo of the British-Indian forces 
under General Marshall, coming up the Tigris 
through Bagdad. The plan of joining these forces 
and those of General Allenby at Aleppo was now 
approaching its completion. The Turks on the 
right flank of the British armies advancing north 
of Bagdad, who had been operating in northern 
Persia, began a quick retreat from their positions, 
and the forces of General Marshall advanced to 
Mosul. From here an advance toward Aleppo 
was in progress when the war came to an end. 
With Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine in the 
hands of the Allies, with Arabia free and Ar- 
menia crying for independence, there was little 
left of the once powerful Turkish Empire except 
the territory immediately surrounding Constan- 
tinople. 

In Russia a terrible state of affairs existed. 



298 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

Anarchy was universal. The Bolsheviki, from 
murdering the nobility and plundering their cas- 
tles and estates, had turned upon the middle 
classes. Lenine and Trotzky, now known to have 
been German agents, exercised only a nominal 
control. Out of all this misrule the Germans 
expected to derive great profit, by placing upon 
the thrones of the various states into which Rus- 
sia was breaking up rulers who would be favor- 
able to the plans of the kaiser. The German lead- 
ers thought that when the great mass of the popu- 
lation had had enough of Bolshevism, they would 
welcome even German domination rather than 
live in a state of anarchy. Thus, despite the 
unfavorable turn of affairs in the West, Ger- 
many thought that if she could bring the vast 
areas of Russia, extending to the Pacific, under 
her control, she would have compensation for all 
that she might lose elsewhere. 

There were no organized forces in Russia to 
fight this scheme of German domination, and the 
Allies began to see that such forces would have 
to be provided. A nucleus already existed in the 
form of a body of Czecho-Slovak prisoners, who 
had fought in the armies of Austria, and been cap- 
tured by the Russians. These prisoners, liber- 
ated after the peace of Brest Litovsk, instead of 
returning to Austria, determined to go to the front 
in France by way of Vladivostok, the Pacific 
Ocean, America, and the Atlantic, a journey which, 



THE GREAT BATTLE OP 1918 299 

had they completed it, would have taken them 
nearly around the world. Securing arms and 
equipment from the disorganized Russians, they 
began to make their way toward Siberia. 

The Bolsheviki, under orders from Lenine, who 
in turn acted under instructions from Berlin, at- 
tempted to stop the Czecho-Slovaks and disarm 
them. The latter resisted, and seized parts of 
the great Trans-Siberian Railroad. In this way 
some of them reached Vladivostok, while others 
remained in Central Russia, unable to get out be- 
cause of the opposition of the Bolsheviki between 
them and the coast. 

At this juncture the Allies determined to send 
troops into Siberia to aid them, and joint forces, 
including both Americans and Japanese, were 
landed at Vladivostok. Japanese forces also 
operated northward from the Chinese border, as- 
sisted by Chinese troops and Cossacks who had 
retreated across the frontier. 

Another Allied force, in which Americans were 
included, was sent into Russia by way of Arch- 
angel, and an advance was begun toward the south, 
against the opposition of the Bolshevist forces, 
but with the support of the intelligent and more 
conservative elements of the population. 

These expeditions to restore peace and a stable 
government to the Russian people were still under 
way when the great war terminated, and while 
military domination by Germany of that country's 



300 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

vast territory was prevented, the future of Russia 
was very far from being settled. 

With this brief review of the operations on out- 
lying fronts, let us now return to the crucial phase 
of the great battle, in France. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 

The Allied Counter -Offensive — Final Phase 

WHEN we left the western front, the British 
had cut the Hindenburg Line in the north, 
while the Americans, by removing the trouble- 
some St.-Mihiel salient, were about to undertake 
a similar operation in the south. Marshal Foch 
was about to strike again at the German center. 

Very significant advances had been made daily 
at several points along the center of the line, in 
which American troops had taken an increasingly 
important part. 

The advance north of Soissons, as we have seen, 
was made for the double purpose of encircling the 
powerful St.-Gobain position and forest on the 
south, and at the same time of getting behind the 
high ridge of the Chemin des Dames along the 
river Aisne. West and north of Soissons the Al- 
lied forces were now north of the Aisne, toward 
which the troops of the crown-prince in the Marne 
salient, still resisting along the river Vesle, must 
retreat. Marshal Foch determined that when the 
Germans in their movement northward reached 

301 



302 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

their lines on the Aisne, these lines should already 
be outflanked. 

American troops, in this operation, distin- 
guished themselves in the capture of the Juvigny 
Plateau, an area of high ground south of the river 
Ailette, which commanded the approaches to Laon. 
The attack began on August 28, the Americans 
being brought up under cover of darkness, in 
motor-trucks, from another part of the front. 
Early in the morning they went into battle accom- 
panied by French shock troops, and within fifteen 
minutes prisoners began to stream back toward 
the rear. The plateau was heavily fortified, and 
its defenders resisted desperately, employing their 
usual machine-gun tactics, but the Allied advance, 
aided by light French tanks and airplanes, made 
steady progress. After five days of the most bit- 
ter and stubborn fighting, the plateau was cleared, 
and important positions on the highway running 
from Soissons northward to St.-Quentin taken. 
The French commanders everywhere expressed 
their admiration for the work done by the Ameri- 
cans, and declared that they were proud to com- 
mand such troops. No soldiers could have fought 
with greater bravery and spirit. 

Further north, the French armies operating 
south of the Somme advanced rapidly through 
Roye and Chaulnes toward St.-Quentin and La 
Fere, thus threatening the St.-Gobain position 
from the north as it was already being threatened 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 303 

from the south. Early in September they reached 
Ham, and were close to the main Hindenburg 
Line. 

North of the Somme the British also were press- 
ing closely upon the heels of the retreating Ger- 
man armies. The troops operating through the 
break in the Hindenburg Line opposite Arras were 
close to Douai and the large French city of Lille, 
both important points on the railway which 
formed the German main line of retreat on this 
part of the front. 

Now came the shattering blow delivered by Mar- 
shal Foch at the German center. On September 
18 British forces under General Eawlinson, which 
included two divisions of Americans, and French 
forces under General Dcbeney, attacked the outer 
defenses of the Hindenburg Line north of St.- 
Quentin, and carried them at two points. Intense 
German counter-attacks now held up the advance. 
At once Foch struck further north, using General 
Byng's army, with American divisions operating 
between Byng and Eawlinson. Moeuvres, only 
seven miles west of Cambrai, fell, and with Gen- 
eral Home's British army north of General Byng 
also attacking, the entire line crashed forward on 
a wide front opposite Cambrai. The fighting was 
of the most desperate and bloody nature. Within 
a few days the suburbs of Cambrai were reached, 
the Americans taking Bellecourt, Nauroy, and the 
key position of Guillemont Farm. The St.-Quen- 



304 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

tin Canal, which here formed one of the defenses 
of the Hindenburg Line, was crossed by General 
Rawlinson 's forces at Belle Eglise. The work of 
the American troops at this point— -representative 
of what they did at every other point at which they 
were engaged — has been described by General 
Rawlinson himself, in an interview given on the 
battle-field. 

"You American correspondents," said General 
Rawlinson, "should not pass by this place without 
hearing what your men did here, and what it 
meant. This is where two of your American divi- 
sions fought splendidly, and where many of them 
died. No troops ever fought more valiantly. In- 
experience cost them more men than they should 
have lost, but their courage and determination in 
the face of tremendous obstacles was magnificent. 
What they did here will make the name of Guille- 
mont Farm famous in American history. It was 
one of the vital spots of the war. As you see, this 
farm is higher than any of the surrounding ridges 
for miles. 

"Over there, five miles away, was the main 
Hindenburg line, running through the town of 
Bony, which was a regular rabbit warren of con- 
crete boche dugouts, trenches, and tunnels. For 
two and a half years the boche had been building 
and strengthening this line, and he firmly believed 
it proof against any army in the world. This 
place where we stand was the outpost of the main 




<c) Underwood & Underwood 

FOUR 



FAMOUS ALLIED 



King Albert of Belgium 
General Diaz 



COMMANDERS 

Marshal Petain 
General d'Esperey 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 305 

line. When, on September 25th, the commander- 
in-chief determined that the attack upon the line 
was to be made, our first job was to take this farm, 
because this, as is very easily seen, was the only 
spot from which the main line could be effectively 
shelled at any point where it was not necessary 
to cross the canal. 

"The boche knew the vital nature of the farm 
just as well as we did. He knew we had to have 
it, and he had exhausted his ingenuity in trying 
to make it impregnable and untakable. Line 
after line of trenches honeycombed the hill, hun- 
dreds of big guns were trained on it, and it was 
literally covered with machine-gun nests and 
barbed wire entanglements. It was mined and 
defended in a quite remarkable way. 

"It is a fact that this farm was taken and re- 
taken not less than seven times before we finally 
held it. Once your American boys went clear 
through and over the hill, but they failed to mop 
up [destroy the hidden machine-gun nests and 
other defenses in their rear] and the boche, coming 
out of his back trenches after they had passed, 
counter-attacked, retook the hill and cut them off. 

"Our attack had begun at five o'clock in the 
morning of September 25th, with the two Ameri- 
can divisions and the Australians. The French 
were on our right. The fight here lasted three 
days, and in the end it was tanks that carried the 
crest. 



306 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

"Your troops had to come up these steep slopes 
from the valley under terrific machine-gun fire, 
and they behaved with the utmost valor. Know- 
ing full well what the loss of this farm meant the 
boche defended it with tremendous force and de- 
termination, and it was only really captured when 
the tanks got in the trenches and 'sat down' on the 
machine guns. 

"With this hill in our possession we gave the 
main line a forty-eight-hour bombardment, and 
then, when our infantry attacked, we went through 
and got Bony. The [Hindenburg] line was 
broken, and the boche has never been the same 
boche since. His confidence was shattered. 

"At the same time the other attack of the 46th 
British Division succeeded, and the St.-Quentin 
canal was crossed, but that is another story. 
What I want you to understand was the signifi- 
cance of the Guillemont Farm fight in the smash- 
ing of the Hindenburg line, and to tell you of the 
part the Americans played in it. Every American 
should know about it." 

In treating a subject so vast within the limits 
of a single volume, it is possible to indicate only 
in the broadest way the operations of the armies 
engaged. This description of the fight at Guille- 
mont Farm by the general in command tells the 
story of hundreds of similar conflicts, in which the 
troops of all the Allied nations fought and died 
with the sublimest courage. In previous wars 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 307 

acts of great bravery could be singled out as nota- 
ble ; in this great war they were universal. Only 
cowardice would have attracted attention. 

General Pershing, in his report to the United 
States Secretary of War, made after hostilities 
had ceased, has this to say concerning the work of 
American divisions operating with the British and 
French on various parts of the front : 

"Other divisions attached to the Allied armies 
were doing their part. It was the fortune of our 
2d Corps, composed of the 27th and 30th Divisions, 
which had remained with the British, to have a 
place of honor in co-operation with the Australian 
Corps on September 29th and October 1st in the 
assault on the Hindenburg line where the St. 
Quentin canal passes through a tunnel under a 
ridge. The 30th Division speedily broke through 
the main line of defense for all its objectives, 
while the 27th pushed on impetuously through the 
main line until some of its elements reached Gouy. 
In the midst of the maze of trenches and shell 
craters and under crossfire from machine guns the 
other elements fought desperately against odds. 
In this and in later actions, from October 6th to 
October 19th, our 2d Corps captured over 6000 
prisoners and advanced over thirteen miles. The 
spirit and aggressiveness of these divisions have 
been highly praised by the British Army com- 
mander under whom they served. 

"On October 2-9 our 2d and 36th Divisions 



308 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

were sent to assist the French in an important at- 
tack against the old German positions before 
Rheims. The 2d conquered the complicated de- 
fense works on their front against a persistent de- 
fense worthy of the grimmest period of trench 
warfare and attacked the strongly held wooded 
hill of Blanc Mont, which they captured in a sec- 
ond assault, sweeping over it with consummate 
dash and skill. This division then repulsed strong 
counter-attacks before the village and cemetery 
of Ste. Etienne and took the town, forcing the 
Germans to fall back from before Rheims and 
yield positions they had held since September, 
1914. On October 9th the 56th Division relieved 
the 2d, and in its first experience under fire with- 
stood very severe artillery bombardment and 
rapidly took up the pursuit of the enemy, now 
retiring behind the Aisne." 

Field-Marshal Haig, the British commander- 
in-chief, wrote of the work of the Americans under 
his command as follows: 

"Now that you are leaving the British zone I 
wish again to thank you and all the officers, non- 
commissioned officers and men on behalf of my- 
self and all ranks of the British armies in France 
and Flanders for the very gallant and efficient 
service you have rendered during your operations 
with the British Fourth Army. 

"On the twenty-ninth of September you partic- 
ipated with distinction in a great and critical 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 309 

attack which shattered the enemy's resistance on 
the Hindenburg line and which opened the road to 
final victory. 

"The deeds of the Twenty-seventh and Thirtieth 
American Divisions which took Bellecourt and 
Nauroy and gallantly sustained the desperate 
struggle for Bony will rank with the highest 
achievements of the war. 

"The names of Brancourt, Premont, Busigny, 
Vaux-Andigny, St. Souplet and Wassigny will 
testify to the task and energy of your attacks. I 
am proud to have had you in my command. ' ' 

The terrific thrust at the Hindenburg Line op- 
posite Cambrai broke it definitely in the center, 
and the Allied troops occupied the city on Octo- 
ber 9. The situation of the German armies was 
becoming precarious. 

Some days earlier, on September 28, Marshal 
Foch delivered his final crushing blow in the north. 
While the German positions along the Belgian 
coast east of Dixmude were being bombarded by 
units of the British Navy, the Belgian Army, 
under King Albert, together with a British army 
under General Plumer, attacked from the Pasch- 
endaele Ridge near Ypres, north to the sea. 
The attack was immediately successful, penetrat- 
ing a distance of five miles on the first day. Many 
prisoners were taken, and the usual large numbers 
of guns, and great quantities of ammunition and 
other stores. Within two weeks the Germans, 



310 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

their flank in Belgium thus threatened, began a 
rapid retreat from the Belgian coast, giving up the 
submarine bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend. 
Bruges fell, and the Allies moved on Ghent. 

A general survey of the front at this stage of 
the battle shows the German lines torn from their 
anchor positions on the North Sea, cut opposite 
Arras, with the Allies approaching Lille, Douai, 
and the Belgian frontier, cut again further south 
at Cambrai, and dangerously threatened from St.- 
Quentin to Laon. Let us now take up the final 
blow in Marshal Foch's great strategic plan — the 
cutting of the Hindenburg Line by General Per- 
shing and his troops north of Verdun. 

Before considering this difficult operation, we 
should understand something of the nature of the 
task which confronted the American armies at 
this point. 

The Germans did not depend entirely upon the 
Hindenburg Line for their defenses in Belgium 
and northern France. Behind it they had three 
other strong lines, stretching from Belgium to the 
southeast. But while these lines were widely 
separated at the center, and to some extent in the 
north, they all came together in the south, joining 
each other in a tremendous system of defenses 
many miles deep, from a point just north of Ver- 
dun down to the fortress of Metz. To General 
Pershing and his men was assigned the almost im- 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 311 

possible task of cutting through these lines where 
they ran close together, north of Verdun. 

The purpose of this operation was as follows: 
The Germans in Belgium and France had two 
principal lines of retreat to their frontiers in case 
of disaster. One of these lines consisted of the 
railroads running eastward through Belgium to 
the German frontier at Liege. These lines were 
now in the greatest danger. 

The other great avenue of retreat open to the 
Germans was the double-track railroad running 
through Maubeuge, Mezieres and Sedan to Metz. 
Sedan lay some twenty-five miles north of the 
Allied lines about Verdun. If General Pershing 
and his men could reach Sedan, the entire German 
force in Belgium and France would be caught in 
a gigantic trap, from which there was no possibil- 
ity of escape, since between these two main ave- 
nues of retreat lay the mountainous Forest of the 
Ardennes, affording no passage for large bodies 
of men with their stores and equipment. 

The first movements of the American forces 
north of Verdun began in September, immediately 
after the taking of the St.-Mihiel salient, and while 
they were in progress, a final thrust at the Ger- 
mans in the vicinity of Cambrai must first engage 
our attention. 

On October 8, Foch struck south of Cambrai, be- 
tween that city and St.-Quentin, which latter place 



312 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

was menaced by the French. Three British ar- 
mies drove against the now tottering German de- 
fenses and broke them to pieces. In three days of 
terrific fighting they passed far to the rear of the 
old Hindenburg Line, and in the north threatened 
Valenciennes, while in the south they took Le 
Cateau. Lens, Lille, and Douai, in the north, 
were evacuated by the enemy, while on the French 
front the armies of General Mangin captured the 
St.-Gobain Massif, Laon, and La Fere. The Ger- 
man armies on the west front were in a desperate 
plight, their only hope to retreat to the safety of 
their own frontiers. Let us see how General 
Pershing's armies prevented their escape. 

Seldom in history have troops been assigned so 
difficult a task as the one which now confronted 
the Americans north of Verdun, and seldom if 
ever have they accomplished such a task more 
brilliantly. The entire operation occupied about 
six weeks, and there were more men engaged in 
the battle on the American side than in any in 
the country's history. The main German lines at 
this point, consisting of almost impregnable posi- 
tions lying one behind the other for a depth of 
over ten miles, were the strongest, the most for- 
midable, they possessed. They understood fully 
that a break here meant the collapse of their entire 
system of defenses west of the river Meuse; in- 
deed, with Pershing's forces advancing to the 
north on both banks of that river, they could 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 313 

not hope to make an effective stand west of the 
Rhine. 

Not only did the German defenses north of Ver- 
dun consist of innumerable artificial barriers of 
every sort — trenches, forts, barbed-wire entangle- 
ments, and machine-gun nests by the thousand — 
but there were great natural barriers, such as the 
high ground at Montfaucon, and above all, the 
great Argonne Forest itself, stretching for ten 
miles in a north-and-south direction just west of 
the river Meuse. This forest the Germans had 
converted into one huge maze of hidden barbed- 
wire entanglements; concealed nests of machine 
guns, placed so as to enfilade every avenue of ad- 
vance; steel forts containing machine guns built 
in trees, with dugouts below into which the gun- 
ners could retire during bombardments, only to ap 
pear again as soon as the bombardment had 
ceased, ready to direct their fire on the advancing 
enemy. 

A dense forest fortified in this way is the most 
difficult barrier to an army's advance which it is 
possible to encounter. The foliage of the trees 
prevents observation by airplanes from above. 
Fallen trees, swamps, and traps made by digging 
deep pits and covering them with thin boards and 
sod, render tanks almost useless; even artillery 
is of little value, since the gunners, unable to lo- 
cate their targets by airplane observation or 
otherwise, can only fire blindly, often with danger 



314 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

to their own men. In some cases the barbed wire, 
interlaced between the trunks of trees, formed 
such impassable barriers that bridges had to be 
constructed by the American engineers, under fire, 
before the infantry could advance across them. It 
was through many miles of such a forest as this 
that the American troops were called upon to ad- 
vance; and they did it, week after week, with the 
greatest heroism, suffering large losses, but keep- 
ing doggedly on, their work, without spectacular 
features, attracting little attention beside the 
smashing successes the Allies were gaining on 
other parts of the front. When the full story of 
General Pershing's advance through the Argonne 
Forest is written, it will form one of the most bril- 
liant pages in American history. 

The American forces, their right flank lying on 
and protected by the Meuse, their left moving 
through the Argonne Forest, began the attack 
early in the morning of September 26. The 
troops had been moved into the front-line trenches 
during the night, taking the place of the French 
infantry holding them. It was hoped to surprise 
the Germans, and to some extent this was done. 
On the first day of the attack the enemy's front- 
line trenches were occupied, and by September 28, 
against constantly increasing resistance, Gen- 
eral Pershing's men had advanced from three to 
seven miles, taking the hill and fortified village of 
Aiontfaucon and eight other villages. At the 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 315 

same time, an American division operating with 
French Colonial troops advanced up the east bank 
of the Meuse, to protect the main army's right 
flank and prevent the Germans from shelling it 
from across the river. This first phase of the at- 
tack netted the American forces ten thousand 
prisoners. 

A thrilling incident of the advance in the Ar- 
gonne Forest was the loss of an entire battalion 
of American troops in the depths of the wood. 
Advancing beyond their supports, they were cut 
off and surrounded by the Germans for three days. 
Although virtually without food and water and 
subjected to constant fire day and night, they re- 
fused all suggestions of surrender and were finally 
rescued, after heavy losses, by their advancing 
comrades. 

The army now halted to dig in, and consolidate 
its gains, while engineers were at work in the 
shell-torn areas back of the new lines, repairing 
roads and bridges so that heavy artillery and sup- 
plies could be moved rapidly forward. Heavy 
rains made the work extremely difficult. Often 
the men were obliged to haul their guns forward 
by means of drag-ropes. Meanwhile the enemy, 
taken by surprise, appreciated his danger and 
rushed up heavy reinforcements of his best troops 
from other parts of the front. No matter what 
happened elsewhere along the battle-line he knew 
that here he must hold fast. Heavy counter-at- 



316 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

tacks were made against the American lines dur- 
ing the following week. The Americans not only 
held their ground but continued to make small but 
steady advances. The defense of the Germans, 
especially that of their machine-gun detachments, 
was desperately brave, and the American losses 
were large. 

On October 4 the lines were again sent forward, 
and advanced against very heavy concentrations 
of reserves hurriedly brought up by the Germans. 
Division after division of the best troops the Ger- 
mans had were hurled against the American lines, 
only to be thrown back broken and defeated. 
Ground was won almost by the foot ; yet so steady 
and continuous was the progress that by Octo- 
ber 10 the Argonne Forest had been cleared of 
the enemy, in spite of his desperate resistance. 
American 14-inch naval guns, mounted on espe- 
cially constructed railway trucks permitting high- 
angle fire, were used with good effect in driv- 
ing the enemy out of the woods, as well as in shell- 
ing railroad junctions and yards, ammunition 
dumps, and other points far behind the lines. 
These guns discharged shells weighing fifteen hun- 
dred pounds, and their extreme range was thirty 
miles. 

At the northern tip of the forest was situated 
the town of Grand Pre, and it was planned that 
the American forces should unite at this point 
with a powerful advance being made by the French 



THE GNEAT BATTLE OF 1918 317 

to the west of the Argonne Forest. The French 
troops under General Gouraud, driving northward 
east of Rheims, made large gains all along the line. 
By the last day of September the Allied forces 
just west of the forest had reached Binarville, six 
miles below Grand Pre, while off to the west the 
American troops mentioned by General Pershing 
in his report as having taken Blanc Mont were 
rendering splendid assistance to General Gou- 
raud 's forces in the capture of Somme-Py. 

In order to reach Grand Pre, General Pershing's 
forces were obliged to penetrate the second Ger- 
man line of defense north of Verdun, called the 
Kriemhilde Stellung (or position). By the mid- 
dle of October, fighting every inch of the way, the 
American armies had cut deeply into the Kriem- 
hilde position, and reached Grand Pre, where they 
were joined by the French. Half the distance to 
Sedan had been gained, and the attempts to hold 
the Americans back had cost the Germans a quar- 
ter of a million men. 

At about this time, in spite of the heavy work 
still facing the American armies, General Per- 
shing was nevertheless able to detach two divis- 
ions from his forces and send them to the front 
in Belgium to assist the French operating about 
Ypres. 

These troops gave a good account of themselves, 
winning distinction in their operations along the 
river Scheldt, and capturing Audenarde. The 



318 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

commander of the army corps to which they were 
attached gave them especial praise for their energy 
and dash. 

In Flanders the French took Roulers on Octo- 
ber 14, and on October 17 the Germans evacuated 
Lille. All the Belgian coast was in Allied hands. 
The British and French were nearing Valen- 
ciennes and Hirson, both points on the line to 
Sedan and Metz. 

The American offensive reached Grand Pre on 
October 16, and the following day Romagne, an 
important post in the rear of the Kriemhilde Line, 
was taken. At the same time advances equally 
satisfactory had been made up the east bank of the 
Meuse. On October 23 Bantheville, on the west 
bank, was reached. On November 1 a final great 
assault in force was launched which swept every- 
thing before it. Over seven hundred and fifty 
thousand American troops took part in the attack. 
In twenty-four hours the battle had become a rout, 
with the Germans everywhere in retreat. So rap- 
idly did they fall back that on November 3 the 
American troops were conducting the pursuit in 
motor-trucks. Heavy guns were rapidly brought 
up so as to command with their fire the railroad 
line running through Montmedy, Conflans, and Se- 
dan. When this was done, the Germans were vir- 
tually trapped, as the road was almost useless to 
them, but the American infantry kept on. An 
entire army corps crossed the Meuse to the east 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 319 

bank on November 5, and the following day, the 
forces on the west bank reached a point opposite 
Sedan. As General Pershing said in his report 
to the Secretary of War : 

"The strategical goal which was our highest 
hope was gained. We had cut the enemy's main 
line of communications and nothing but surrender 
or an armistice could save his army from com- 
plete disaster." 

The Germans used forty divisions of their best 
troops in their effort to stem the American ad- 
vance, and failed, although they held every advan- 
tage of position. They lost during the battle 
twenty-six thousand prisoners and four hundred 
and sixty-eight guns. Measured by its results, 
they had sustained one of the most disastrous de- 
feats in history. 

The great Battle of 1918 had now drawn to a 
close. Everywhere along the long battle-line the 
Allies were advancing almost at will. Ghent, 
Valenciennes, Maubeuge, Hirson, Mezieres, Sedan 
had fallen, and by some singular fate the British 
had fought their way across the frontier between 
Belgium and France to the town of Mons, at which 
place, over four years earlier, their expeditionary 
force under General French first came into con- 
tact with the German armies. Equally interesting 
is the fact that the war ended with the arrival of 
French and American troops at Sedan, which, it 
will be remembered, was the scene of the great 



320 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

French surrender during the Franco-Prussian 
War. Now indeed were the tables turned. 

The Germans knew that they were decisively 
beaten. They knew that a great American army 
was ready to cross their frontiers south of Verdun, 
isolate Metz, and invade Germany by way of the 
Ehine. The war was lost. The people at home 
refused to support the military party any further. 
They asked for a cessation of hostilities. 

Diplomatic exchanges, looking to the granting 
of an armistice, had been going on between Ber- 
lin and Washington for many days. At last the 
Germans were informed that if they wanted an 
armistice, they must apply to Marshal Foch. On 
November 8 envoys reached the headquarters of 
the great commander, which he had established in 
the ruined village of Senlis. Their first words 
were, in substance, "Marshal, Germany's army is 
at your mercy." 

Terms upon which the Allies would consent to a 
cessation of hostilities were laid down, in the form 
of an armistice, and after three days the German 
envoys accepted them, and the armistice was 
signed. Immediately, on November 11 at eleven 
o'clock in the morning, fighting ceased on all 
fronts. The German emperor had meanwhile fled 
to Holland, where he later abdicated his throne, 
and almost at once Germany became the scene of 
a nation-wide revolution against the rulers and 
military leaders who had brought on the war. 



> 




© Underwood &■ Underwood 

SURRENDER OF THE GERMAN HIGH SEAS FLEET 
The column is led by a British light cruiser 




i Underwood & Underwood 

PRESIDENT WILSON AND PARTY 

Under the guidance of Cardinal Lucon, they are inspecting the ruins of the cathedral 

Rheims, France 



THE GREAT BATTLE OF 1918 321 

General von Ludendorff fled to Sweden, and one 
by one the rulers of the several German states 
were forced to abandon their thrones. 

It has been said that in the hour of granting the 
armistice Marshal Foch showed more than at any 
other time the greatness of his character. He had 
fought with infinite skill for many months to bring 
about a German defeat, first through the dark 
hours of the great German offensive in the spring, 
and later, through the brilliant successes of the 
summer to the crowning glory of victory. In an- 
other week, or at the outside two, he would have 
been able to cause the most colossal surrender 
in the history of the world. Yet, in order that 
no more lives might be sacrificed, he permitted 
the fighting to cease. A smaller man might have 
found many pretexts to delay negotiations, mean- 
while insuring to himself this huge military tri- 
umph. That Foch did not do so places him among 
the world's immortals. 



CHAPTER XXX 

RESULTS OF THE WAR 

THE immediate result of the war was the sign- 
ing of an armistice which left Germany pow- 
erless. Her allies had already been rendered so. 
There was no possibility of further resistance. 

In a general way the armistice with Germany 
provided that her armies should at once be with- 
drawn from all invaded territory, in Belgium, 
France, Luxemburg, and from Alsace-Lorraine, 
fourteen days being allowed for this operation. 
Forces of the Allies and the United States were 
to occupy these territories as the enemy withdrew. 
Russia and Rumania were also to be evacuated. 
All inhabitants of invaded countries who had been 
carried off to Germany were to be returned at 
once. 

The German armies were to surrender to the 
Allies as they withdrew, 2500 heavy guns, 2500 
field-guns, 30,000 machine guns, 3000 trench mor- 
tars, 2000 airplanes, 5000 locomotives, 50,000 rail- 
road cars, 10,000 motor-trucks, and a vast amount 
of other war material. All merchant ships be- 
longing to the Allies in German ports were to be 
returned. The German navy was to be virtu- 
ally destroyed by the surrender of 160 submarines 

322 



RESULTS OF THE WAR 323 

(all she possessed), 6 battle-cruisers, 10 battle- 
ships, 8 light cruisers, 50 destroyers, and a large 
number of auxiliary ships, such as repair vessels 
and mine-layers. 

All prisoners of war in German hands were to 
be released at once, the Allies, however, retaining 
all their German prisoners. The iniquitous treaty 
of Brest Litovsk, as well as the one forced on 
Rumania, were declared void. Every precaution 
was taken to render Germany, from a military 
standpoint, helpless. Allied and American troops, 
advancing into German territory on the heels of 
the retiring enemy, were to occupy the Rhine cities 
of Mayence, Coblenz, Cologne, and the bridge- 
heads on the eastern side of the river, so that 
crossing could not be effected, while a stretch of 
territory along the east bank of the Rhine over 
eighteen miles in width, from Holland to the Swiss 
border, was declared neutral ground. 

All these provisions were to be carried out 
within thirty days from the date of the armistice, 
and meanwhile a conference was held in Paris to 
arrange the terms of a permanent peace. 

On November 20, Germany's great sea surrender 
was begun, when twenty submarines were turned 
over to an English squadron off Harwich. On the 
twenty-second it was completed by the delivery to 
the Allied and American fleets of the battle-ships 
and other war-craft named in the armistice. In 
litter silence the German battle fleet steamed 



324 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

through a lane of British, French, and American 
war-ships twenty miles long, comprising the most 
powerful body of fighting-vessels ever assembled, 
and was interned in the Firth of Forth, on the 
east coast of Scotland, pending the final decision 
of the peace conference concerning it. 

The officers and men of the Allied and Ameri- 
can battle-fleets looked on in pitying contempt as 
these great German war-ships crept silently to 
their anchorages. It was recalled that in the war 
between the United States and Spain the Spanish 
ships under Admiral Cervera (shut up in the Har- 
bor of Santiago, Cuba, by a superior American 
force) had made a hopeless but gallant dash for 
liberty, and had gone down with flags flying. In 
justice to the German officers it should be recorded 
that they planned a similar dash into the North 
Sea, but their crews, infected by the doctrines of 
Bolshevism, refused to obey orders, and the plan 
was abandoned. Certainly nothing could have 
been gained by such a move from a practical stand- 
point ; yet one cannot but believe that an American 
or Allied fleet, similarly situated, would have made 
it. 

On land the withdrawal of the German armies 
progressed rapidly, and early in December French 
forces occupied Mayence, American troops entered 
Coblenz, Cologne was taken over by the armies of 
Great Britain, while the Belgians crossed their 
borders and assumed charge of the German cities 



RESULTS OF THE WAR 325 

of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) and Diisseldorf. 
Everywhere the German inhabitants expressed 
astonishment at the moderation shown by their 
conquerors. Their cities were not subjected to 
the iron rule which they had forced upon the cities 
of Belgium and France; instead, the inhabitants 
of them were treated as human beings, and the 
occupation was made without the least friction. 
In Alsace and Lorraine the French population 
greeted their deliverers with joy, and when those 
provinces were formally taken over by France, 
General Petain was raised to the rank of Marshal 
of France, as Foch and Joffre had previously 
been. In Belgium King Albert returned to his 
capital in Brussels amid scenes of the wildest re- 
joicing, while in northern France the refugee 
population streamed back toward the villages and 
towns that had once been their homes, only to find 
in most cases that they were returning to heaps of 
shattered ruins. 

In Germany, as in Austria, chaotic conditions 
prevailed. The abdication of the rulers of the sev- 
eral German states was followed by the setting up 
of provisional republican governments in many 
places. Friction developed at once between Prus- 
sia and the South German states. Bavaria was 
declared a republic. A similar government was 
formed in Berlin. Sailors at Kiel, workmen at 
the great Krupp plant at Essen, organized local 
governments under the control of the ' ' Reds, ' ' and 



326 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

elsewhere movements of the same sort werp begun. 
The final adjustment of affairs in Germany, 
Austria, and Russia belongs to the political rather 
than to the military history of the great war, and 
we shall not attempt to treat it here. Certain 
definite results, however, were brought about by 
the war, and can be perceived at its close. Oth- 
ers can be only foreshadowed. Among the former, 
it may be regarded as finally settled that France 
has regained her lost provinces of Alsace and 
Lorraine, and that Italy has placed under her flag 
the Italian-speaking territories around Trent and 
Trieste. That autocratic government in Germany 
and Austria is a thing of the past seems beyond 
question. Arabia is finally freed from Turkish 
rule, and has become an independent kingdom. 
The Armenian people have formed a republic. 
Whatever disposition is finally made of the Turk- 
ish provinces of Syria and Palestine, it is un- 
likely that they will be restored to the rule of the 
sultan, and the same thing may be said of Meso- 
potamia. The Dardanelles will doubtless be 
opened to free passage by the ships of all nations, 
and Constantinople be made an international 
port. In the Balkans a greater Serbia will be 
formed, and not only Montenegro but Bosnia and 
Herzegovina will probably unite with her. 
Transylvania, by the vote of her people, became a 
part of Rumania on December 7, 1918, and the 
former Russian province of Bessarabia was united 



RESULTS OF THE WAR 327 

with Rumania the year before. Albania will 
doubtless achieve its independence. 

The Czecho-Slovaks of Bohemia have formed a 
republic, which the United States and the Allies 
have recognized. Both Hungary and Poland have 
become republics. The Yugo-Slavs in southwest- 
ern Austria have declared their independence, as 
have the people of the Austrian Tyrol. In Russia, 
Livonia, Esthonia, and Courland have formed a 
joint Baltic federation of free states, while Lithu- 
ania, the Ukraine, and Finland have asserted their 
independence. The German-speaking people of 
the old Austro-Hungarian Empire have expressed 
a wish to unite with those of their own race in Ger- 
many, while the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein de- 
sire once more to become a part of Denmark. 
Everywhere we see a breaking up of artificial 
groupings of peoples into new and independent 
states, formed of those of the same race, under 
governments of their own choosing. The princi- 
ple so well expressed in the American Declaration 
of Independence, that "all governments derive 
their just powers from the consent of the gov- 
erned,' ' seems destined to spread throughout the 
world. 

And as the artificial grouping of peoples of dif- 
ferent races under unjust forms of government 
was the basic cause of the war, so its destruction 
everywhere should be the war's most important re- 
sult, guaranteed, it is planned, by a League of Na- 



328 THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

tions. In accomplishing this, many difficulties 
must arise, many grave problems be solved ; but, as 
we have said, these questions are political ones, 
and belong to the period of reconstruction, of 
peace. We have attempted to outline the progress 
of the great war from a military standpoint, and 
with the cessation of hostilities our narrative 
properly comes to a close. Colossal as were the 
sacrifices which the war involved, no thinking man 
can doubt that the benefits to humanity which will 
flow from them will more than outweigh those sac- 
rifices. Those who suffered, died, have not done 
so in vain. In the immortal words of Abraham 
Lincoln, "they gave their lives that government 
of the people, by the people, for the people, might 
not perish from the earth. ' ' 



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